Stories from the Abyss
by NajaLau
Summary: When the Avengers seek out the help of an expert on the occult, they get more than they bargained for in the form of two brothers who have literally been to Hell and back. No one could have foreseen the consequences of this meeting, but as the old saying goes: When you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you. ***Noncompliant with Avengers: Age of Ultron***
1. Chapter 1 - The Asset

**Warnings: **Swearing and vague references to alchol, sex, and death. Mostly mild, but later chapters _will_ include more mature and explicit content. Expect things to get dark. Specific warnings will be posted for each individual chapter. No slash!

**Timeline(s): **Deliberately unspecified, but roughly 3-4 years after _The Avengers_ movie and sometime after the (still unaired) season 10 of _Supernatural._

**Disclaimer: **I do not own _The Avengers _or _Supernatural. _In fact, the only thing I lay claim to as my own is any and all mistakes since I have no beta.

**Author's Note: **Although everything that has already happened in the Marvel Cinematic Universe/Supernatural is canon, I am playing loose and fast with both universes going forward, which includes shaking up and adding to the Avenger rooster (borrowing heavily from the comics) and referencing events that have not happened onscreen. I have also _not_ incorporated what little is known about the upcoming 2015 Avengers movie, since that just seemed like borrowing trouble. So there.

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><p><em>"Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, <em>

_dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. _

_Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, _

_b__lickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein."_

_Translated:_

_"He who fights with monsters should look to it_

_ that he himself does not become a monster. _

_And when you gaze long into an abyss _

_the abyss also gazes into you."_

_- Friedrich William Nietsche (1844-1900)_

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><p><strong>Chapter 1 - The Asset<strong>

"I still don't get why _I_ had to come," Tony bitched, his petulant tone combining with his suit's characteristic metallic pitch to produce a rather odd effect."In case you hadn't noticed, I'm an extremely busy guy what with being a superhero, saving the world on a regular basis, inventing nifty stuff, _and_ going to awesome parties. Honestly it's exhausting. Not that I'm complaining, mind you. I'm just saying..." Tony's ramblings were cut short by the arctic look Hawkeye sent his way even as the sniper's focus remained firmly on their surroundings, a desert eagle clutched comfortably in his right hand.

Ignoring the almost visible waves of hyper vigilance that were rolling off his team member, Tony shrugged and continued his tirade: "... that if this guy is as paranoid as you say, why couldn't you have brought Captain Goody-Two-Shoe instead? A handshake and that 'I am an American hero' crap Cap does and I guarantee that your mystery guy will be first in line to join the Avengers' fan club. And yes, before you ask, we do have an official fan club. Not that I've spent any time researching it of course, and I definitely don't know that the president is a really, really hot chick named Stacy who loves yoga, kittens, and for some reason heavy metal rock, which in my opinion just makes her exponentially more hot."

"Stark."

"Yes?"

"Shut the fuck up."

Looking at the team's resident sniper and certified sociopath (he had the S.H.I.E.L.D. psych profiles to back up the claim), Tony instantly swallowed his instinctive snarky reply.

Hawkeye's face had taken on _that_ expression. The expression that he had worn for months after New York and which quite frankly freaked Tony the hell out. Barton's eyes were completely dead and his face had gone carefully blank except for the slightest hint of a smirk twisting his lips; half a challenge and half a promise of violence and a not-so-swift death to anyone who fucked with him.

It was, Tony had realized after the first few weeks of sharing a living space with the man, the sniper's fall-back position when he felt stressed, threatened or uncertain. And it came complete with lethal startle responses and a sadistic streak that had made even the Widow blanch on occasion.

It was also shit-your-pants terrifying when it was focused directly on you. Especially if you had seen firsthand the kind of carnage a pissed off Hawkeye was capable of.

Waiting half a beat to see if his message had been received, Barton nodded and his cold smirk deepened for a second before he took the lead again, completely ignoring his garish gold and hotrod-red colored companion.

"Asshole," Tony mouthed mutely behind the safety of his helmet before picking up the pace.

What was his deal anyway? Sure Barton was a stone cold killer with some serious mental issues, and yeah okay, so his friend/comrade/lover/fuck-buddy or whatever the hell Mockingbird had been to him, had died a pretty horrible death three months ago. But Tony was definitely not going to think about _that_ right now because then he would start to remember other things, such as the sanctimonious garbage Cap had spewed at her memorial or Fury's callous spiel about tactical decisions and acceptable losses, and just thinking about it made his teeth itch and the permanent coil of burning anger in the pit of his stomach roil.

So no, he was not going to think about Bobbi or the fucked up mess her death had left the Avengers.

Anyway, Barton's issues had issues. According to his S.H.I.E.L.D. files, Loki's brainwashing had only been the rotten cherry on top of a truly shitty sundae that had been his life up to that point. Tony was actually a little impressed that the guy was as mentally stable as he was. On a good day he could even be pleasant company with a surprisingly funny, if somewhat twisted, sense of humor and a clearly unhealthy obsession with blowing shit up. A vice Tony himself shared. This had lead to some quality bonding time before Pepper (now also categorized as a toxic mental subject which was studiously avoided) had put her foot down in concern over the continued structural integrity of the tower.

Hawkeye was a teammate, someone he trusted his life with on a regular basis. And yes, on a good day Tony would even categorize Clint as a friend; albeit a scary, antisocial, and sometime slightly psychotic friend. Today, however, was obviously not a good day.

Tony sighed. He had really hoped they'd moved past this part of the teambuilding process because quite frankly the fact that he was more often than not thrust into the role of the responsible adult, the peacekeeper, the one who, for Christ sake, 'played well with others'; well, that sentence in itself pretty much just summed up how incredibly screwed up the rest of the team's social skills were.

Fuck it! He sucked at walking on eggshells anyway, and it was not like Barton was actually gonna shoot him. And even if he did, there really wasn't much damage a bullet could do to his titanium enforced armor, even if Hawkeye was the greatest marksman in the world and, standing a mere five feet away, could probably single out a particular alloy molecule and hit it.

"You seem unusually grouchy there, Katniss." Ah well, in for a penny in for a pound. "Did Granny Russia kick you out of her bed with blue balls this morning?"

Tony could see Hawkeye's shoulders tense almost imperceptively at his first barb. The archer's smile, when he turned around and stared at Iron Man, was downright nasty. But his eyes had lost their dead expression and instead sparkled with sudden glee, which Tony decided should count as a win in the grand scheme of things.

"You do realize that Natasha can hear you over the comms, seeing as she's running this op, right?"

Oh shit. Fuck. Shit. Holy shitfuck. He was dead. Like literally dead. Tony felt his guts turn to water and he swallowed thickly. The Black Widow's real age had only recently been revealed to the team and while she was still smoking hot, like ridiculously supermodel going on goddess hot, the knowledge that she was over 80 years old had really put a crimp in his favorite sexual fantasies starring the red-haired assassin. It didn't seem to bother Clint though, if the traffic around Natasha's door, monitored dutifully by Jarvis' hallway cameras, were anything to go by. Not that he had been keeping tabs of course, since that would be creepy and stalkerish.

"I'll buy you a new Lamborghini if you don't kill me when we get back," he offered up as a Hail Mary to the suddenly very ominous silence on the comm link (static was for inferior engineers).

Holding his breath he quickly did a mental tally of the pros and cons of living, sleeping, and shitting in the suit 24/7 vs. finding a nice isolated cave somewhere to live in for the next couple of years.

"Make it two new Harley Davidsons and you've got yourself a deal." Came the blessedly cool and, as always, calm voice of Romanoff over the comm. "Oh, and Tony. If you ever call me that again, I will cut out your tongue and give it to Pepper in a nice box with a big pink bow," she threatened pleasantly and with completely sincerity.

"Deal!" He accepted gratefully, ignoring the bit about she-who-shall-not-be-named. And also carefully ignoring the little voice at the back of his mind pointing out that it probably wasn't normal to be threatened with actual death and/or bodily harm by your friends and colleagues on a daily basis.

Hawkeye, the bastard, had smirked the whole way through the conversation. His eyes had never stopped sweeping for threats though, nor had his finger slipped so much as a millimeter from the perfect pressure point of the trigger.

Still feeling the cold sweat of his near miss crawling down his neck, Tony couldn't help but feel deeply resentful of the whole situation. He hadn't asked to be out here saddled with a pissy hawk and a scary spider in his ear, in fact he had vehemently opposed this assignment. The hangover from, let's be honest not so much last night as this morning, was steadily making its presence known in the slightly stale air of the suit and now that he was thinking about it the cut on his right hand was starting to itch annoyingly without any chance of relief (a little known fact was that random itches were the bane of his existence as Iron Man).

"Who the hell is this guy I'm slogging through the ass end of nowhere to meet anyway?" He asked grumpily.

"An important asset," came the Widow's smooth answer. She had apparently decided to join the conversation now that the radio silence had already been broken. Either that or she was attempting to cushion Hawkeye's last fraying nerve by relieving him of the need to engage with Tony.

"Oh well, if it's an _important_ asset." Tony was rather proud of the amount of sarcasm he'd managed to infuse into the sentence.

He could clearly hear Natasha's sigh over the comms. "He's an expert on the occult. Supposedly one of the best, even though we have next to no intel on him. And what we do have is..." He heard a slight hesitation in her voice, as if she was carefully choosing her next words, "... even if the rumors have been wildly exaggerated... worrying."

Which explained why Hawkeye was in DEFCON 1 mode. Apart from _hating_ going in blind to a meet, the mere mention of magic or the occult usually meant hours spent on the range shooting things with more than a little prejudice - and if he was out on a mission, then God help the poor schmuck that had the misfortune of being his target. But then again, after Loki who could really blame the guy?

Still. A year and a half ago, a disgraced former apprentice of Strange had decided to muck around with dark forces far beyond her power in a regrettable fit of megalomania. The result had been a swirling vortex of fire and brimstone raining down destruction on a small sleepy town in Nebraska. As soon as the kill order had gone out (and the non-killing members of the Avengers had removed themselves from the field) Hawkeye had taken her down. Hard. To this day Tony still got a little nauseous when he saw shish kebab.

"I still don't see why I had to be the one to come out here," Tony returned to his original complaint. "Why can't Fury's pet agents handle this little meet 'n' greet. I mean we're the A-team. Literally. Huh, there must be some sort of copyright infringement thingy right there. I should check into that when we get back."

"Because he would only meet with members of the Avengers," came the dry response, ignoring the last rambling part, before continuing: "'Said he wanted to meet someone he could recognize from the media. And he asked specifically for you. Which you would already know if you hadn't been more or less comatose during the briefing." The Widow's voice managed to convey cool disapproval while being completely neutral at the same time, which all things considered was a rather impressive trick.

Tony didn't raise to the bait. He also didn't need to ask why Natasha, their best manipulator and therefore negotiator, wasn't out here instead of a jumpy and slightly homicidal Hawkeye. Although medical had declared her almost completely healed from the whole gigantic cobra and snake venom poisoning ordeal, 95% was still not the same as a 100%, and there was no way in hell Clint would allow his partner to go into a potentially dangerous situation playing wounded. Bobbi, for obvious reasons was also out, and since this was more of a S.H.I.E.L.D. operation than Avenger business, at least one agent had to be present. Pym, the smug bastard, was currently sitting comfortably in the jet (nose practically glued to a Stark pad) acting as potential backup should things go sideways.

Cursing whatever whim had made the asset (or just ass, ha!) request him specifically for this date, Tony petulantly trampled on the small twigs and medium branches that lined the path they were currently following. He felt a slight rush of satisfaction from this minor act of destruction right up until the moment Hawkeye turned around and gave him a murderous look for making a racket and giving away their position.

Some days Tony really hated his life.

Iron Man had initially flown them the first couple of miles from where the jet had set down in a barren field. Hawkeye had quickly ordered them down though, and they had now been walking for ten agonizing minutes through a mostly wooded area (side note: the suit had _not_been designed for land based locomotion ).

Tony's earlier comment about this being the ass end of nowhere was, if not particularly kind, not completely unfounded either. During the last half hour of the flight on the jet, the only thing the landscape had been able to offer was a few scattered small towns, mostly of the one main street variety, connected by long stretches of highway, lots and lots of fields as well as the occasional dark green splotch of a forest or black twisty bends of a river, back-dropped by an unassuming mountain range in the horizon.

Despite the general lack of landmarks, Hawkeye appeared to know exactly where they were going. Tony hadn't bothered to find out and wasn't even completely sure which part of the country they were in, having slept through most of the two and half hour flight. The archer finally slowed down when they cleared the last of the small patch of trees they had been walking through and took stock of the decrepit barn, sagging and groaning under its own weight, that now faced them. Parked next to the structure was a shiny black muscle car; a classic Chevy Impala, Tony noted absentmindedly, and in amazing condition too despite the clear mileage on the machine. The main barn port stood slightly agape, as if to invite them in.

Tony was not impressed.

"Seriously?" He groaned. "What is this, a hoedown party for hillbillies? And I didn't even bring my dancing shoes."

"Hawkeye, report," Romanoff's voice cut through Tony's complaining.

"Meeting point identified. The car is here as described. No visual on the asset so far." Hawkeye answered in a clipped voice.

"Acknowledged. Proceed as planned."

"Copy."


	2. Chapter 2 - A Hunter's Greeting

**Warnings: **Swearing. Otherwise a pretty light chapter.

**Disclaimer:** Once again, I own nothing and am just playing around for the fun of it.

**Author's Note:** So far, I have namedropped/introduced Barbara 'Bobbi' Morse aka Mockingbird, Henry 'Hank' Pym aka Ant-Man and Stephen Strange aka Doctor Strange/The Sorcerer Supreme. Just in case anybody didn't quite catch the references.

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><p><strong>Chapter 2 - A Hunter's Greeting<strong>

Before they got any closer to the barn, Hawkeye turned and caught Tony's gaze.

"All right, here's the plan. We go in, you say as little as possible, you don't make any smart comments, and if things go fubar we improvise as always. Otherwise follow my lead. Understood?"

Tony's "Sir, yes sir!" garnered him another patented Hawkeye death stare. He felt like he was almost starting to built a certain immunity to them by now.

Impossible as it seemed, Hawkeye's tension appeared to ratchet up another notch as they approached the dark entrance to the barn. Tony wouldn't be surprised to learn that the agent could actually feel the individual vibrations from the ground in the hyper-aware state he was in. He suddenly wished he had asked more questions about the man they were about to meet. When the famously ice-veined Hawkeye was this keyed up it usually meant that shit was about to hit the fan in a spectacularly unpleasant way and today Tony had the dubious honor of being smack dab in the middle of the spray-zone.

With a careful, and clearly reluctant, move Hawkeye holstered his gun. Tony reminded himself that they were here to meet and possibly recruit a potential ally and not to engage a hostile in a battle to the death or something equally dramatic. On the other hand, bitter experience had taught them to always be prepared for and, depressingly enough, to also expect the worst possible outcome.

Doing a quick systems check, he surreptitiously armed the small rockets hidden under his shoulder plates. He wasn't too proud to admit that he had stolen the inspiration for them from Hammer's micro fusion detonators. Scratch that, Hammer was a slimy toad and an amateur to boot so yeah, he was definitely too proud to admit to the plagiarism, but at least they packed a really mean punch and with his own personal improvements they were 17% more destructive and just under 22% more accurate.

"Oh, by the way, although the asset said he'd meet you alone, look out for a partner. Apparently he and his brother operate as a team." Natasha's cool voice advised him from the comm link.

Watching Hawkeye step in and get swallowed up by the shadows of the barn, Tony couldn't help but mutter: "Oh great. You know, that's the kind of thing you might want to mention _before_ your partner just willy-nilly entered a potential ambush. Just saying, you could've slipped it casually into the conversation anytime. I mean we're only walking into a potential life or death situation here."

"You were too busy bitching to listen. Besides it was included in the risk assessment during the briefing. Now shut the hell up, Tony, and focus on the mission," the Widow shot him down.

Swearing softly, Iron Man followed his teammate into the cool darkness of the old barn. The suit's sensors immediately adapted to the change in lighting and so Tony didn't have to waste any time getting his eyes to adjust to the gloom, unlike the very unhappy looking Hawkeye.

The first thing he noticed was the fine white line of what looked like crystallized rock salt he had to step over as he passed the threshold. He just managed a mental, 'huh, weird', before his eyes were drawn to the array of creepy symbols and sigils adorning basically any surfaces that would have them.

He really, _really_ hoped that the dark red color was from a paint can and _not _blood as he suspected. Not entirely unused to seeing strange occult markings - they did after all have _The_ Sorcerer Supreme on the Avenger's payroll - Tony was still pretty sure that they had just officially crossed from the moderately weird into the twilight zone of batshit crazy.

The guy standing at the other end of barn, however, was almost painfully normal looking compared to his handiwork. Out of all the adjectives Tony's slightly stunned brain could dredge up, 'blue-collar' seemed to fit the bill most accurately. With maybe just a hint of white trash thrown in to balance the look. He wore heavy, scuffed leather boots, patched and faded jeans, a nondescript long-sleeved T-shirt covered with an ugly-ass tartan shirt, and to finish the look an honest to god Redneck cap covered his short-cropped hair and hid most of his features in its shade.

His body language was wary, muscled arms crossed over his chest and eyes glittering alert and suspicious from the shadows of his face. Oh, and he was also clutching a truly evil-looking knife in his right hand with the air of someone who knew exactly how the business end worked. Leaning against his left knee, a sawed-off shotgun rested in comfortable reach and Tony thought he could spot at least one ankle holster complete with a handgun as well as the sheath for another knife strapped to the other leg.

Well, good on him for being prepared. So was Tony, not to mention he was pretty sure Barton had a small arsenal tucked away, God alone knew where, in his Kevlar suit. In fact the guy had a really unhealthy relationship with his weapons - Tony had once caught the sniper snuggling his bow as he slept off a concussion after an 85 hour mission. Natasha had taken pictures (which none of them had ever seen since). Of course, Thor's obsession with his hammer made Hawkeye seem like the sanest person on the planet and Tony himself had been known, on occasion, to spend slightly more time than was strictly necessary waxing his suits, so really who was he to judge?

At the sight of the two Avengers, a slow smile spread across the stranger's face, flashing white teeth through the scruffy beard that covered his chin, but otherwise doing nothing to dispel the air of danger that simmered around him.

"Aw man, this is so _cool_." His voice was deep and gravelly, yet still managed to convey a fanboyish enthusiasm.

Taken slightly aback from the mismatching signals being sent, crazy vs. normal, menacing vs. friendly, Tony decided to follow orders, hang back, and let Hawkeye take the lead.

"I take it you are 'borax-kills-monsters-no-it-really-does'?" The sniper's voice held a slightly pained note at being forced to use the ridiculous internet call sign. Tony felt his lips twist in an involuntary grin. There was a good chance he might actually come to like this guy.

"Nah, that'd be my brother. He's the one that likes to chat with strangers on the internet. I've tried to tell him over and over again, stranger-danger Sammy, but I guess you just can't stand in the way of true love." The man drawled and, from what Tony could make out from the shadows, waggled his eyebrows in suggestive manner at the last bit.

At Hawkeye's impassive stare, the guy sighed and pushed away from the table he had been leaning against. "All right. I guess we'd better get this show on the road then." Although his voice hadn't lost its drawl, there was now a more serious note to it. Tony also didn't miss the way he'd grabbed the shotgun and now held it expertly, yet relaxed, in his left hand. He suddenly felt a warm glow of appreciation for the bulletproofness of his armor.

"Before we can become BFFs and make friendship bracelets, there are a just couple of formalities we have to get out of the way." The guy, Tony mentally decided to dub him Cletus as an homage to Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel from the Simpsons, had apparently decided to take the lead in this little pow-wow. Casting a quick glance at Hawkeye, he decided to keep his promise and be a good little sidekick. For now.

"Formalities?" Hawkeye's tone, while not hostile, was definitely not friendly either. In fact it might be the single most neutral thing, Tony had ever heard. This was so not going well.

"If it is within acceptable mission parameters, humor him," Romanoff's voice ordered softly from the ether.

As if sensing the mounting tension, Cletus gave them another disarming smile. "Don't worry. I just need you two fine gentlemen to step forward a bit into this nice circle," he indicated a big circle painted in the middle of a carefully cleared space in the center of the barn, which was incidentally right between the two parties. The circle had been filled out with obscure symbols and what looked to be the broad outline of a pentagram.

Eyeing the circle, Tony mentally shrugged and started to move towards it. However, Hawkeye's hand shot out lightning fast and halted him before he had taken more than a single step.

"What does it do?" This time the agent didn't fully manage to hide the distrust in his voice. Wonderful, the magic-phobic and super paranoid professional killer was being asked to step into a great big magic circle by a potential nutcase or possibly evil mastermind. What could possibly go wrong?

"Nothing at all. _If _you are, who you say you are, that is." Cletus the potentially nutty mastermind answered easily, although his eyes were suddenly very, very focused and he subtly shifted his stance, almost as if he was readying himself for an attack.

Risking a quick glance at Hawkeye and seeing that the agent's raging paranoia had (surprise, surprise) not been eased by their host's cryptic response, Tony almost groaned in frustration. He also noted that Hawkeye's left hand was casually hovering very close to his gun. Damn it, he was so _not _going to end up in an all out firefight over something as stupid as a finger-painted circle, magic or not.

Almost as if sensing Tony's line of though, Hawkeye hissed out, "_Tony,_" half in warning and half as an order.

"It's not gonna hurt. Scout's honor. I just gotta be sure you're a 100% human, man." Cletus said in a reconciliatory, 'what can you do' tone of voice.

Saying a quick prayer, Tony quickly brushed past Hawkeye and, before he could think too much about it, stepped into the circle. Freezing in anticipation of whatever the hell magic circles did when they were activated, he held his breath. Nothing happened. Whatsoever. Truth be told, it was just the teeniest bit disappointing.

"Told'ya."

"What do you mean 'a 100% human'?" Tony couldn't help but ask curiously, as this moment where absolutely nothing horrific was happening to him continued to stretch on pleasantly.

"There are all kinds of nasties that can take on the skin of people. Speaking of, I'm gonna need to you to take off the helmet _Iron Man_." The way the guy's face lit up when he used Tony's superhero moniker clearly gave away that he was a fan. A fan holding a very big knife and a shotgun in the middle of a satanically redecorated barn, but hey it was still flattering. Tony briefly considered introducing him to Stacy.

In the meantime, Hawkeye had apparently decided that the risk of stepping into the funky circle was outweighed by the mission objective of playing nice and, although he didn't look real happy (when did he ever?), he at least managed not to shoot anybody, which was definite progress in Tony's mind.

"Allrighty, so I'm guessing not demons." Cletus smiled at them beatifically. "But like I said, you can never be too careful."

Over the next couple of minutes they were alternately handed a small silver flask filled with lukewarm and rather stale water that they were ordered to drink from (Cletus sipped from it first in a show of good faith) and another bottle, this time plastic, containing a liquid which smelled suspiciously like... "Is this Borax?" Tony asked incredulously.

"Yup."

"Huh. I hope you don't expect us to drink it."

"Nah, just pour some of it on your skin."

The guy shrugged at the look Hawkeye sent him. "Worse case scenario you get a little sticky. It's a small price to pay for humoring me," he said, unconsciously mirroring Romanoff's words.

Hawkeye grunted in reply and poured a liberal dose over his forearm. By this time, Tony had divested himself of most of his left metal glove and his faceplate was open. He quickly followed Hawkeye's example.

Having never had any real intentions of following Hawkeye's original instructions of silence anyway (as if), Tony had pretty quickly realized that if they wanted any chance of this meeting ending in anything other than bloodshed, he'd have to handle most of the social niceties. The business end of this meeting, he'd leave up to Hawkeye though, since he was still a bit fuzzy on who the hell this guy was and why they needed him specifically.

Besides it just wasn't in his nature to keep quiet when there were sarcastic comments to be made. Nobody put Tony in a corner.

"So what's next?" He asked brightly. "You want us to prove that we know the super secret handshake?"

"Nope. I just need to see your blood," Cletus whipped out a slender silver blade from thin air and handed it hilt first to Hawkeye. "But that secret handshake sounds awesome. Maybe you can teach it to me later."

Apparently resigned to the situation, Barton didn't hesitate for a second before drawing a thin line of blood across the meaty part of his arm. Tony, however, balked when he was handed the knife. "No way am I cutting myself with a knife. It is way too teenage angsty for my image. Besides it cannot be hygienic to use the same knife."

Hawkeye once again mobilized his death stare, clearly running out of patience, "Tony either you do it yourself... or I help you."

Tony had been around the archer long enough to know a real threat when he heard one. "Crap."

Licking his lips nervously, he grabbed the knife and tentatively cut the skin on the back of his hand. Damn, that hurt way more when you knew it was coming. Bright red blood welled up.

"There. Happy?" Tony knew he was sulking, but couldn't quite find it in himself to care. "What the hell was it even supposed to prove?"

"That you're not a 'shifter," came the unhelpful answer. "Or a werewolf, I suppose," Cletus added almost as an afterthought. "Anyway, congratulations. You're human."

The silver knife was whisked away to whatever pocket dimension it had originally come from and the shotgun was put down on a nearby table. But the last knife remained firmly in Cletus' hand, almost as if it was a natural extension of his arm.

Apparently passing the tests only bought so much trust.

"Sorry 'bout all of this. But at least now you get to say that you've tried a proper hunter's greeting."

"Lucky us," mumbled Tony sarcastically. "So what now?"

A scarred fist was offered, first to Hawkeye and then Tony, who shook it awkwardly with his free and now bleeding left hand. Cletus' grip was strong and rough, calloused skin and scarred knuckles attesting to both hard work and a history of violence.

Seeing him up close, Tony gauged the asset's age to be somewhere in the mid-thirties. He had good looks and a boyish charm that would have made him seem a lot younger if it hadn't been for the old look in his eyes complete with a couple of crow's feet and a few faint scars cutting across his chin and forehead.

"So, what can I do for the Avengers?" Cletus asked as he lead them to a rickety table and three even shakier chairs which had clearly been salvaged from somewhere in the barn. Tony wisely chose to keep standing, but Hawkeye took a seat, letting down his guard slightly.

"Why don't we start with an introduction?" Hawkeye offered, in what was, for him, an almost friendly manner. "I'm..."

"Clint Francis Barton, codename Hawkeye," Cletus interrupted. "The world's greatest marksman, former US marine scout sniper, and all around badass."

Turning to Tony, his smile once again threatened to split his face. "And of course Tony Stark, _the_ Tony Stark. Also known as Iron Man. Dude, you're like my hero. You've got it all, the chicks, the cars, the flying robot suit!"

Tony couldn't help grinning as the guy geeked out. "I agree, I'm awesome. Just wait until you see my private island, it's got..." he caught himself as he felt Hawkeye's heavy gaze on him. Really, the guy could do with some lightening up. "So yeah, maybe this isn't the best time. But trust me, it is very, very cool."

"Aw man, that sounds _sweet_."

Feeling his control over the situation slipping, Hawkeye chose that moment to loudly clear his throat. The happy smile on Cletus' face disappeared in a flash, as if he had been caught doing something wrong, but before Tony could blink it had been substituted with a cocky grin that didn't quite reached his eyes.

"Dean. Dean... Hunter," Cletus, or apparently Dean, introduced himself. The slight hesitation before he gave up his last name pretty much told Tony that it was a fake. As if reading his mind, Romanoff's voice murmured: "He's lying. His name is Dean Winchester, born January 24, 1979, in Lawrence, Kansas to John and Mary Winchester, both deceased. He has a younger brother Samuel, born May 3, 1983. No other known family."

Without giving the slightest hint that he'd just heard Romanoff's impromptu mini-biography, Hawkeye simply nodded and said: "Thank you for agreeing to meet with us, Mr. Hunter."

"Yeah. So, uh, what is this all about?"

"We need your help locating and retrieve someone, who may or may not have been taken by force."

"Have you tried going to the police? I hear they are very gung-ho about kidnappings." Winchester joked.

"The man in question is very powerful and as a consequence has very powerful enemies." Hawkeye continued, ignoring the comment.

"And what makes you think this is within in my... area of expertise?" Winchester asked, now serious.

"We found his rooms in shambles, mystic symbols not unlike these, " Hawkeye nodded at the barn walls, "on the floor, painted in blood. And it looked like there had been a very powerful explosion, except there was no residue left to give any hint as to its origin or nature. The only thing we did find was the body of a local barista and the outline of what can only be described as a pair of very big wings burnt into the carpet."

Winchester grew very still. "I thought you already had a 'wizard' on your team. Shouldn't he be the one to deal with this?"

"Stephen Strange, The Sorcerer Supreme. And yes, we would normally go to him for this kind of thing." Hawkeye gave him a humorless smile. "The only problem is, that the man who is missing _is_ Stephen Strange."


	3. Chapter 3 - Bird's Eye View

**Warnings: **As usual swearing. Overall pretty mild but does include offhand references to PTSD, death, and child abuse.

**Disclaimer: **Nothing has changed since the last chapter which means that I still don't own _The Avengers _or _Supernatural._

**Author's Note: **For those of you who don't already know the Leeroy Jenkins reference I command you to stop reading immediately and go google it. You might as well also type in Darwin Award while you're at it.

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><p><strong>Chapter 3 - Bird's Eye View<strong>

"Well, I think that went really well!" Stark commented brightly as he lifted them off the ground, thrusters scattering leaves and twigs around like a miniature hurricane had suddenly come into existence.

Looking down at the barn, which was steadily shrinking to the size of a doll house as they gained altitude, Clint had to agree. By all accounts, the mission had been a success.

It was about goddamn time too.

He knew that some of the other agents at S.H.I.E.L.D. had started a betting pool on how long the Avengers' streak of bad luck would continue, and with a track record of twelve botched missions in a row (ranging in severity from the Wasp and Iron Man accidentally colliding mid-air and crashing into a hotdog stand to dozens of dead civilians littering the streets and Mockingbird drowning in her own blood) the size of the pool had started to reach the 'retire to a beach for the rest of your life' level. Also, those agents were giant assholes for not letting him get in on the bet.

Lucky fucking number 13.

Not that he was counting this as a win yet. He knew better than to start celebrating before the mission was officially over. In fact, he wasn't going to let his guard down until they were safely back at the Tower and had gone through the whole nine yards of medical checkups and debriefing. As a soldier, he had seen too many missions go fubar in the eleventh hour because the men had relaxed too soon. Not on his watch. Never again...

For a brief second, the thundering sound of wind in his ears turned into the barrage of heavy artillery. Without missing a beat, Clint automatically slammed the mental door closed.

Nonetheless, things could have gone much, much worse. Stark had of course been his usual jackass self, but all things considered he hadn't done too badly. There had even been a moment where he'd managed to distract the asset and give Clint the split second he'd needed to compose himself and not give away that he had spotted the other Winchester comfortably positioned in the rafters and aiming a Remington 700 at his head.

Clint couldn't tell whether Winchester's request for the presence of Iron Man at the meeting had been a stroke of pure tactical genius or a random whim. Although after having met the guy, the smart money was probably on fifty-fifty. Clint did know that no matter how unhappy Tony had been at being dragged along, Clint had been even less pleased at the prospect of being saddled with him.

Out of all the Avengers, Iron Man was probably the last person you'd want to bring to a tense, high-stake, and volatile situation. The billionaire was about as manageable as a three-year-old on a sugar rush and while the Iron Man suit was more or less bulletproof, the guy standing next to him, in this case Hawkeye, usually wasn't.

Although to be fair, Stark had long since earned his place on the team, beyond merely footing the truly obscene bills and playing a glorified sugar daddy. He would never make a good spy, but he was an integral part of the Avengers and no one could say he didn't pull his own weight.

His tactical awareness was still for shit, though. Genius engineer he might be, and Clint would even admit that he was a half decent aerial fighter, but as long as he continued to blindly barge into kill boxes like today, he continued to be a liability in Clint's book. And liabilities had to be babysat. And Clint _hated_ babysitting.

Sometime during the first year of the Avenger Initiative, Iron Man had pulled another one of his truly spectacular and idiotic stunt during an engagement with a group of wannabe terrorists outfitted with black market Chitauri tech. In the aftermath, Fury had marched into medical and played a video of a jackass running kamikaze-style and screaming into battle and getting his whole crew massacred.

At first Thor had been confused, Banner was still zonked out after his transformation, Natasha had merely raised an eyebrow, Cap's expression had been half puzzled and half disapproving until a smile finally tugged its way free, and Clint had been in stitches. It didn't matter that the video was from a computer game or that Tony was still unconscious and therefore couldn't properly appreciate it. It was still the best thing Clint had seen in years. 'Leeroy Jenkins' had promptly become the codeword for whenever Iron Man decided to try out for the Darwin Award, and Clint still delighted in the pissed-off look Tony would give him whenever he ended up in medical and Clint quoted "at least I have chicken" at him.

He had even sacrificed a whole weekend of leave to go spray-paint those exact words on the still smoldering rubble that had once been Tony's Malibu house before the moron had challenged an international terrorist on open air. Admittedly the gag had become a whole lot funnier _after_ the team had gotten confirmation that Stark was still alive. Whatever. Natasha had laughed.

"Hey Romanoff. We're about five minutes out so start warming up the jet." Clint heard Stark report over the comms.

"Roger that," came Natasha's clipped reply.

Watching the drab landscape pass by and ignoring the acute discomforts of being squeezed by a metal suit flying at 70 m/h through the freezing Nebraska air, Clint allowed himself a brief moment of relief. It wasn't often that his gut was wrong, in fact he barely needed one hand to count the number of times it had happened, but he was profoundly grateful that today had been one of the rare exceptions.

Hawkeye was no stranger to going into dangerous situations with little or no intel, but in this case it hadn't so much been a lack of information as it had been a question of sorting the 'confirmed' from the 'speculative', the 'probably true' from the 'obvious bullshit', and then of course there was the pile of 'holy shit, this is fucking insane' which could pretty much double as a horror story. Coincidentally, while that last folder had been the least substantiated it had also been the thickest.

Between the police rapports, witness statements, and the stories collected from anonymous and sketchy internet forums (not unlike the one where Natasha had finally gotten in contact with username 'borax-kills-monsters-no-really-it-does') the Winchesters were painted as anything from deranged, sadistic serial killers to pretty much the saviors of the world. About the only thing all the accounts agreed on was that they were unpredictable, extremely dangerous, and that you _really_ didn't want to mess with them.

Of course, that description fit most of the people, and occasionally creatures, the Avengers faced on a weekly basis.

One thing he _could_ say for certain about the Winchesters was that they were professionals, either trained or self-taught.

After the initial contact had been made and Winchester had agreed to meet, on his terms of course, the Avengers had only received a time and the conditions that Iron Man and one other well-known Avenger show up alone and on foot. Winchester had withheld the coordinates for the location of the meet until just three hours prior to the meeting, which with the flight time from New York had meant only 10 minutes of prep time before they had to be in the air. The timetable as well as the remote location had neatly tied their hands and made any recon, except for satellite imaging which proved almost completely useless, practically impossible.

And as an added bonus, up until the moment when Hawkeye had spotted the car, they hadn't even had any concrete confirmation that the man they were meeting really was the infamous Dean Winchester.

Hawkeye could deal with screwy intel, no recon and minimal prep time, and even having his team players dictated by the professional killer he was about to meet. He had even been okay with Winchester having the home field advantage, and he'd anticipated that the younger brother would be lying in wait somewhere as backup.

It had made for every operative's worst tactical nightmare, but he could deal with it.

However, add to that a dash of completely unpredictable, fuck-with-the-laws-of-physics magic and you had yourself a truly hellish cocktail. Hence his bad feeling.

Thankfully, Winchester had decided to play the meet mostly straight and had gone with the threat of good old fashioned lead poisoning rather than 'Abracadabras'. Just for that small professional courtesy, Clint might actually come to like the guy.

He also grudgingly had to admire Winchester's scare tactics with regards to the ghoulish makeover of the barn. Apart from being dramatic, and therefore distracting, the symbols had also kept him guessing as to their nature and purpose. Keeping your opponent off balance was Strategy 101.

Case in point, there had been that single iffy moment with the circle, where Clint's intense dislike of anything remotely mystic had warred with his equally intense dislike of stepping directly into the crosshairs of a sniper rifle. For fucks sake, instead of the circle Winchester might as well have painted a big red cartoon X on the ground and asked permission to paint another one on his forehead for good measure.

Clint was intimately familiar with the risks of being on the wrong end of rifle scope, seeing as he was usually the one doing the sniping and smiting. He didn't have to like it (in fact his skin was still crawling from the imagined sensation of a bullet splitting his skull open like a watermelon) but that was just a part of the job. What he _hadn't_ known were the risks of stepping into that freaky-ass circle and that had made him hesitate and consequently jeopardize everything. And _that_ pissed him off.

Clint knew he was just a grunt - being surrounded by a bunch of geniuses 24/7 had repeatedly made that painfully obvious - but he was damn good at his job. In fact he was probably the best in the world at what he did. The only problem was that his training and hard-earned skills were about as useful as a screen door on a submarine when it came to dealing with things that pretty much said screw logic and triumphantly gave the laws of nature the finger.

You couldn't anticipate, plan, or prepare for magic, and as far as Clint was concerned every single bastard who dabbled in it deserved an arrow through their eye... and spleen, and lungs, and liver, and neck, and scapula because that hurt like a bitch, and then another arrow through the other eye just for good measure - preferably one with an explosive tip, too.

Before Loki, Clint might have been more lenient. After all, he was used to being sent on suicide missions, pitted against impossible odds, so what was one more disadvantage? If he was gonna pussy out over stuff like that he sure as hell would have done so a long time ago. He hadn't been more than 16 (on paper 18) when the army had first stuck a gun in his hand and dropped him into Hell with a pat on the back and a rote "Try not to get yourself killed, kid." Of course compared to Carsons, Afghanistan had pretty much been a five-star vacation.

So no, he didn't have a problem with putting his life on the line. In fact, if you asked him, there was no greater high. But when he stepped out into the battlefield he knew the game, knew the stakes, and knew he had the goods to pay up should he ever lose. Loki had changed all that. Had shown him that there was a whole new set of rules and that the winnings weren't just tallied up in blood, bone, and guts, but also in free will and souls. Things which Clint had put absolutely no stock in since he was about five years old, just like he'd stopped believing in the tooth fairy, Santa Claus or that his mother could protect him and his brother from their father.

Bottom line, Loki was a fucking cunt and if Clint ever saw him again he wouldn't be using his bow to turn him into a pincushion, no he'd be pushing the arrows in by hand, deliberately and ever so slowly. It was one of his all-time favorite daydreams.

Starting their descend, Clint easily spotted the field where the cloaked jet had flattened the thigh-high grass in a suspiciously jet-shaped pattern (S.H.I.E.L.D. was still working to come up with a solution for that particular problem).

Stark, the jerk, dropped him a foot and a half from the ground in front of the invisible plane. He still landed gracefully thanks to his old acrobat training even though his muscles were pretty much locked up from the cold.

Sending Stark and unamused glare, he decided to let it slide just this once since the billionaire, all things considered, had done well today. In fact, if Stark hadn't chosen to blatantly disregard Clint's orders and step into the stupid circle when he did, there was a very good chance that Hawkeye would have had a few more holes in his body now than when the day started. Not that he was _ever _going to admit to that.

Besides, he was pretty sure Tasha was already working on a plan to get him back for that 'Granny Russia' comment, bikes or no bikes.

The air shimmered as the cloaking field was momentarily disturbed when the hatch to the plane opened to reveal the Russian assassin in her black combat suit. "Coming?" she asked, her voice echoing strangely from the stereo effect of her standing ten feet away and at the same time hearing her through the still activated comms.

Walking the few steps to the stairs leading up to the jet entrance he wordlessly caught her attention. She shook her head minutely at the unvoiced question in his eyes. Shit, if the bug he'd planted was somehow malfunctioning they might have to go back and do this the hard way. And despite his best efforts, Clint was still a soldier at heart which meant that he was superstitious enough not to want to test his newfound luck.

He quickly followed her into the shadowy interior of the jet, not waiting for the muttering Iron Man as Stark struggled to get out of his suit - a process which he had apparently spent far less time perfecting than that of getting into the suit if the amount of habitual swearing was anything to go by.

Fury had long since established a zero tolerance policy when it came to wearing metallic and or robotic armor inside S.H.I.E.L.D.-owned vehicles to the chagrin of certain members of the Avengers. But apparently even shady and secret ex-government organizations were as much a slave to their insurance company's tyranny as Joe Everyman.

Natasha had set up a small surveillance desk complete with two monitors, slight overkill since they did not have a visual, and a state-of-the-art audio system which was being manned by Pym. At their entrance he looked up and unconsciously mirrored the Widow's small shake of the head indicating that they were still getting nothing.

"Shit," Clint voiced his thoughts out loud.

"Patience," Natasha counseled. "We caught the tail end of your chat with Winchester so we know it's functional."

They were walking a very fine line with the type of bug they were using. There was an unavoidable tradeoff between power usage aka life-expectancy and sensitivity, and the trick was to hit the sweet spot where it was able to pick up usable audio and transmit it back to them without burning through the battery. In a perfect world Clint would have planted the bug directly on Winchester, but the guy had offered him zero opportunities. Besides it would only have been a matter of time before it would've been discovered, and Clint didn't think Winchester would take too kindly to that kind of breach of trust this early in the game.

At Natasha's questioning eyebrow, Clint merely said, "Chair. Middle of the room." The Widow simply nodded her approval. If they were lucky the Winchester would decide to sit down for a long nice chat.

Letting the relative safety of the jet and Romanoff's presence ease the tension in his shoulder just for a moment, he allowed himself to mentally take a step back from the icy calm focus of Hawkeye in mission mode and instead let a brief glimpse of Clint show in his eyes. "I don't like this, Tasha," he said quietly. "Any of it."

In a micro expression so subtle and quick that anyone but him would have missed it even if they had been looking for it Natasha's face softened. Then she was the Black Widow, deadly assassin and master spy, again.

"I know." There was no reassurance, no promises, no sympathy to be found in her words, only acknowledgement. It didn't mean that she didn't care, just that there was nothing she could do about it and it wasn't in Natasha's nature to offer empty comfort.

Unlike the rest of the Avengers, Hawkeye and the Widow lived in a world ruled by necessity, pragmatism, and above all reality. They did the dirty jobs that none of the others would, or could, and when necessary shielded the rest of the team from the hard and ugly truths.

For instance, when the Avengers desperately needed the help of two dangerous criminals wanted for murder, torture, and grave desecration to mention just a few of the more gruesome highlights. It wasn't a question of what was morally right or wrong, it was simply a question of what was necessary.

To be honest, Clint wasn't even particularly bothered by the Winchesters' body count - after all his own easily matched theirs. Natasha's as well. And he had seen and done things in his life which rivaled even some of their more brutal crimes, although he had to admit that the photographs of a sweet elderly couple stabbed to death in their own home with a Christmas tree had left an impression.

The Avengers might have the strength to face down an entire alien army falling from the sky, but when the enemies no longer presented themselves neatly in terms of black and white or when issues of right and wrong became of secondary importance to the objective of the mission, then the Avengers Initiative lost most of its power and became vulnerable.

This weakness was the main reason why the S.H.I.E.L.D. agents had decided kept the details about 'the asset' to a bare minimum. Clint had absolutely no qualms about shaking the hand of a deranged mass murderer if the mission called for it. Stark on the other hand...

Speaking of, Stark had finally decided to join them, lugging the compact case of his suit with both hands before dropping it deliberately to the floor with a clatter. He then nudged it with his foot to see if it had dented the tile underneath and smiled gleefully at the result.

At the sight of the surveillance equipment he turned and raised his eyebrows at Clint. "What the hell? I thought we were going home."

Clint didn't even bother dignifying that with a response.

"When did you even have time to... you know what never mind. I don't even want to know. This is exactly the reason why none of the other kids like to play with you Barton, you suck at sharing things."

When he still got no response, Stark groaned dramatically. "You did hear the guy say that he'd look into it and get back to us right? Because I'm pretty sure I did. Which means we can just go home and wait for his call. Look I know you have this whole, super spy thing going, but is this really necessary?"

Throwing himself down dramatically on the nearest sofa he continued, "I think I might've left the oven on back at the Tower and you know it's your home too, so maybe if we can just this once forego your paranoid..." Stark's diatribe was cut short by Pym's hand being held out in a gesture demanding silence.

"I've got something." Pym reported.


	4. Chapter 4 - The Art of Communication

**Warnings: **Once again a little swearing. Other than that it's all so tame I won't even bother with a warning.

**Disclaimer: **I hold no claim to either _Supernatural_ or _The Avengers. _This is only for fun, not profit.

**Author's Note: **Sorry for the long(ish) wait. But you know how it is in the summertime - I had oceans to swim in, sunlight to bask in, mountains to climb (well just the one), caves to explore, monuments to gawk at and delicious food to sample. I'll try and make sure that the wait between chapters won't be so long in the future but no guarantees.

Also cheers to those of you who a) left comments b) liked or c) followed. And of course especially thanks to anyone who opted for a combination of the three. Lastly browsers are also much appreciated and as always more than welcome.

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><p><strong>4. The Art of Communication<strong>

_"Hey...krr-krr-krrrch... safe to... krr-krrrch... checked...krrch... perimeter... krrch... no sign of them." _Came the unmistakable voice of Dean Winchester through the speakers, fading in and out but slowly growing in strength as he moved closer to the bug.

Pym fiddled with the settings in an attempt to clean up the audio and his efforts were rewarded a moment later when Winchester's voice came through loud and clear.

_"Oy, you need help getting down, monkey boy?"_

_" - fine Dean." _Hawkeye zeroed in on the faint new voice, trying to match it up against the one he'd heard on the interrogation tapes courtesy of the Baltimore PD. It was deeper, less boyish, but as far as he was concerned it matched closely enough to positively ID the would-be sniper in the rafters as Samuel Winchester.

_"Whatever man. But I am so not catching your ass if you decide to take a swan dive."_

Dean's cavalier attitude was belied a few seconds later when, _"Whoa there Sammy. Careful! I don't really fancy doing the concussion routine two nights in a row."_

All he got for a response were a few faint muffled grunts.

_"Heads up,"_ the younger Winchester instructed a moment later. There was a loud clatter as Dean apparently failed to catch whatever had been thrown.

_"Hey careful with the merchandise. You shouldn't treat a badass lady like this."_

_"Dude, you've gotta stop talking about your weapons like that. It's not healthy."_

Clint saw Tony smirk out of the corner of his eyes.

There was a final _thump_, roughly matching the sound of someone heavy landing after a jump of a feet or two.

_"You're sure they're gone?" _This time Sam Winchester's voice came through almost as strongly as his brother's.

_"What did I just say? I've known how to do a perimeter check since I was eight years old man."_ Dean sounded annoyed. Hawkeye mentally added that little piece of information to his growing file on the older Winchester.

_"Sorry. It's just..." _Sam trailed off.

_"What Sammy, what?"_

_"These guys are not exactly our usual playmates."_

_"Yeah kinda hard not to notice. But I don't care if they're super secret ninja spies or superheroes or whatever. There's no way they're sneakier than a wendigo or a demon or any of the other crap we deal with on a daily basis."_

_"But that's just my point. They won't be trying the same tricks. They've got satellites, electronic surveillance, and all kinds of stuff we've never really had to worry about before. It's a good bet they already got this place bugged."_

Hawkeye tensed.

_"Careful there Sammy, you're almost starting to sound like Devereaux_." Dean's tone was teasing. _"No really, I'm sure I can make you a tin-foil hat if you want. I'll even put a pretty bow on top."_

_"Shut up," _came the huffed reply.

Hawkeye shared a quick look with the Widow. Sam Winchester's profile had repeatedly singled out his intellect as a defining character trait. There was even an old dog-eared file from Stanford University that hinted at the different and much brighter path Sam Winchester had once upon a time been headed down. They would have to be careful not to underestimate him in their future dealings.

_"All right, show me what we've got_." Sam had apparently decided to pick his battles and let the issue rest for now.

_"How much did you catch?"_

_"Pretty much the whole thing. I've got a concussion, I'm not deaf." _Now it was Sam's turn to sound annoyed.

_"Yeah, yeah so you keep telling me. I swear, it's like you deliberately volunteer your head as a punching bag to the bad guys. I mean what is this - the third time this year alone?"_

_"Dean."_

_"You should've let Cas fix you up before we left. Seriously, what's the point of having a magic dude with instant healing powers living in the bunker if we never use him?"_

_"Dean!"_

_"What?"_

Sam Winchester's deep sigh was clearly audible over the speakers.

_"Focus."_

_"Fine," _Dean grumbled.

There was a slight pause.

_"Besides you already know why."_ Sam's voice was gentle, earnest, almost apologetic. "_Cas needs all the juice he's got for... you know. It really takes a lot out of him just to keep it contained and since the gates closed it's not like he can just recharge his batteries whenever he feels like it."_

_"You think I don't know this?"_ Dean's tone was angry and confrontational but underneath it was what sounded like a good dollop of guilt.

The subsequent uncomfortable silence dragged out so long that Tony actually started to squirm in unconscious sympathy.

It was Dean who finally broke it.

_"Whatever. But if you'd shot Iron Man because you were still seeing double, I'm not sure I'd've ever forgiven you." _The forced cheer in his voice was clearly meant as a signal for a change in subject.

_"Dude, I was like 40 feet away. No way I was gonna miss a shot."_ Once again, Sam had apparently decided to follow his brother's lead and let the conversation return to less sensitive matters. "_They were like sitting ducks."_

Dean's only reply was an affirmative snort.

Anticipating Stark's "Wait, what?", Clint quickly quelled whatever the billionaire was going to say next with a sharp motion of his hand.

"Rafters, 5 o'clock. Sniper rifle." He informed succinctly and then silently ordered Stark to stay quiet with another threatening look before turning back to the conversation happening in the barn.

"What do you mean 'sniper rifle'," an indignant Stark whispered loudly as if that would somehow circumvent the decree of silence.

Grinding his teeth, Clint realized that his hope that Stark was simply going to let this slide had probably been too optimistic.

"Sniper rifle as in very big gun aimed at your head the entire time you were in there screwing around and antagonizing the asset." He answered sarcastically while still keeping his voice low.

Clint couldn't help but feel a certain amount of satisfaction at the way Stark paled as this new piece of information was processed and the realization of just how close he'd been to a sudden and ignoble death dawned on him.

In fact, it had probably been an even closer call than Stark imagined. Hawkeye had absolutely no doubt that had either of them failed or refused a single one of the Winchester's wacky mumbo-jumbo tests, the brothers would have wasted no time in killing them. It was almost funny how close Stark had come to having his head blown off without ever realizing it when he'd tried to weasel out of doing the last test with the knife. Hawkeye on the other hand had not missed the flicker of eye contact between the Winchester on the ground and his rifle-wielding brother.

Well, what Stark didn't know couldn't hurt him. At least not retrospectively.

Tony appeared to contemplate his rediscovered mortality for a moment, but true to his nature he quickly rallied, latching on to Clint's last comment. "_I_ antagonized him? Are you kidding me? Hello kettle, yes this is pot calling to tell you what a colossal hypocritical ass you're being," he hissed.

Clint didn't deign to respond to that.

Natasha sent them both look telling them to shut the hell up. Pym merely looked on with mild interest.

"You couldn't have given me a heads up? You know the old 'Hey buddy, by the way there is a sniper aiming a rifle at your head so you might want to, oh I don't know, _put your bulletproof helmet back on_'." Stark's hissing voice had steadily risen in volume until he was easily drowning out the audio from the speakers.

Hawkeye merely lifted an eyebrow clearly conveying that it was not his job to inform Tony of such trivial matters. Especially since Stark should've spotted the threat himself. The fact that there had been no way to discretely let his teammate know in a manner that would _not_ have led to a freak out on Stark's part was besides the point.

Natasha's hiss of "Silent," and murderous glare was enough to put an end to Tony's tantrum although Clint thought he heard the almost inaudible mutter of "Asshole" coming from the billionaire.

Refocusing his attention on the Winchesters' dialogue he caught the tail end of Sam's comment: _" - spotted me within sixty seconds."_

"_What did you expect? The guy's the best sniper in the world. Of course he's gonna make you just walking into the room."_ Dean responded easily.

"_Oh so you knew that was gonna happen? You know, it would've been nice if you'd've told me that beforehand."_ Sam's unintentional mirroring of both Stark's complaint and bitchy tone was almost comical, eliciting a quiet guffaw of laughter from Pym and even twitching the corners of the Widow's lips into the briefest of smiles. Tony started sulking.

"_Aw come on Sammy. You knew as well as I did that the odds were pretty good that they'd send either Hawkeye or the hot Russian and that if they're even half as good as their reputation they'd spot you in a heartbeat."_

_"I still think it was a stupid plan."_ Sam's voice had lost most of its fire and instead sounded rote almost as if he was merely rehashing his point from an old argument that he had already lost once.

_"Yeah well, that's pretty much the Winchester M.O. by now,"_ Dean's response while light was equally tired and held a note of finality to it as if he saw no reason to open up the discussion again.

There was another brief pause.

"_So." _Sam said in a 'getting back to business' voice.

"_Yeah."_

"_Any chance they might be wrong about the wings?"_ The question came with its own fake optimism.

_"No such luck. It was definitely a barbequed ken doll."_

During the short meeting, Hawkeye had handed Winchester a pad with classified crime scene photos showing all the gory details of the body in Strange's apartment in high def. Winchester, he'd noted, had neither shied away nor shown any pleasure at the sight of the bloody scene although he had studied it intently. In fact, apart from a soft "Crap" his face and body language had remained completely blank.

"_And the symbols?"_

_"As far as I could tell they were mostly Enochian with a few other mixed in that I ain't seen before," _Dean almost sounded offended by this. "_Here I took pictures."_

_"Dude you do realize that taking photos with your camera phone of a picture on a tablet is the equivalent of... you know what, never mind."_ Sam quickly backtracked. Clint could almost imagine the look Dean must've been given him, having seen it all too many times on Barney's face a couple of lifetimes ago.

_"Hey a minute ago you were all mister paranoid. I'm not an idiot. It's not like I'm about to take tech from a known government operative."_ Clint had offered him the pad in the vain hope he'd do exactly that._ "That thing was bound to have all sorts of spy crap in it."_

The pad had in fact had four separate bugs in it, two of which had been designed to be obvious decoys, as well as a secondary GPS tracker. For some reason it also had Angry Birds Space edition installed complete with an unbeatable high score. Even the tech guys at S.H.I.E.L.D. got bored sometimes, Clint supposed.

"_Looks almost like a summoning circle or maybe a containment circle of some kind. Although I've never seen anything like it," _Sam Winchester mused, completely ignoring his brother's comments. "_It's got quite a few similarities with a devil's trap, but here... and here... I've never seen those symbols before. And the order and orientation are wrong too. Though from what I'm seeing it was definitely powerful hoodoo."_

"_Oh this is gonna be fun."_ Came the older Winchester's surly reply.

_"Yeah no kidding. The Sorcerer Supreme is a major player. Like think archangel or ancient deity big. Anything that could take him on has got to be seriously nasty."_

_"Fan-freaking-tastic. It's been a while since we last went up against something that could crush us like bugs."_

There was a pregnant pause.

"_You know, we could just let this be... not our problem." _Sam suggested hesitantly. "_I mean, Strange is supposedly a member of the Avengers right? They're superheroes whose actual job description is saving the world." _He continued, his tone growing more earnest.

_"What's your point, Sammy?" _Dean's voice had taken on a dangerous edge.

_"Just that maybe we could sit this one out. Let somebody else handle it," _Sam pleaded. "_Just this once."_

_"And when people starts dying, then what? Are we just gonna sit on our asses, huh?"_

_"They may not be hunters but they are qualified. It's not like they're rookies or civilians. They've even got a Nordic god on their side. Whatever this is let them deal with it. For once it's not our mess."_ Sam argued.

"_Yeah, well. I'm not sure that the innocent guy spending his last moment on Earth as an angel condom would agree with you on that." _Dean's tone was bitter.

Clint felt his mind stutter slightly at the word 'angel'. While the image of the dead body with its eerie blackened outline of giant wings had certainly conjured the word when he first laid eyes on the scene, he had just as quickly dismissed the thought.

Demigods and aliens, magic and 'science fiction' science he had long since been forced to accept as part of reality. But angels were another thing entirely. Angels smacked of God with a capital 'G' and God equaled religion which, as far as Clint was concerned, was nothing but a cheap con. Sometimes people conned themselves using faith as a placebo to feel better about their fucked up lives and sometimes people used it to con others, to manipulate and control and hurt them. In the end it was all the same poison, the same rot.

Hopefully Winchester's turn of phrase had just been another example of the brothers' crazy talk and nothing more. Because if not...

He chanced a brief glance at Natasha. He was probably the only living person on the planet who knew that Natasha Romanoff, daughter of the Red Room and the single most deadly assassin alive, was actually a true believer. Exactly what version of God she believed in, whether vengeful or benevolent, remained her secret. Clint only knew because he had overheard her dying prayer to God on those two occasions when she had been absolutely certain she was going to die; blood and the sacred Russian phrases flowing equally freely from her lips.

In her alone, Clint didn't consider faith a weakness. Didn't begrudge her it, if it brought her even the tiniest sliver of peace of mind. It was the least she was owed. And if not for his own, then for her sake, he fervently hoped that God and his angels would stay firmly in the realm of the ethereal. And if not. Well then, he'd just have to add another god to his kill list.

Putting the thoughts out of his mind, he turned his attention back to the Winchesters, catching Sam's sigh over the speaker.

"_We are not responsible for their actions. Hell, less than an hour ago we thought that there were only three of them left on Earth." _Sam's voice had gone soft.

"_Well, clearly some of the douche bags decided to extend their vacation. And I don't care what you say Sammy. They wouldn't even be here if it weren' for us. So I say that makes their mess _our_ mess too. And there's no way we're just gonna dump this on someone else. End of discussion." _The older Winchester stated with finality.

"_All right."_ Sam capitulated surprisingly.

There was a brief pause of shocked silence.

_"All right?" _Dean's voice was incredulous.

"_Yeah. All right."_ There was a certain smugness to Sam's tone.

"_As easy as that? You're not gonna argue some more."_

_"Nah. What would be the point?"_

_"Oh I don't know. What the hell was the point in the first place?" _Dean almost sounded angry at the ease with which his brother had all of a sudden given in.

"_I figured that if we're gonna go on another kamikaze run we should at least think it through first. Make sure it's what we really want."_ Sam explained simply.

"_Yeah right," _Dean snorted skeptically, obviously still suspicious of his brother's motives.

"_Besides, I can't remember the last time you were this exited. About anything really. You were practically gushing when you got to shake Iron Man's hand. It was actually kind of adorable." _Sam ribbed his brother.

"_Shut up. You're just jealous you got benched."_ Dean retorted weakly.

"_Whatever you say, man. But if you're too shy I'll be happy to get his autograph for you. You could frame it and hang it over your bed._ _It'd go nice with your machete collection_."

Clint couldn't quite make out Dean's grumbled reply, signaling that the brothers were in all likelihood starting to move away from the hidden microphone. In truth the Avengers had gotten almost suspiciously lucky that the two Winchesters had decided to have their conversation practically right on top of the bug.

Pym quickly dialed up the sensitivity, trying to capture as much audio as they could, but all they got was the muffled sound of one of the brothers laughing.

They all instinctively held their breaths for the next minute or so, straining to catch any other sounds. When none came it was predictably Tony who cracked first.

"Well. That was... interesting? Yes I think I'm gonna go with interesting. Anyway, seems like we're getting some new partners. Complete whack jobs, but you know whatever. Yay for us. Now who wants a drink?"

The hyper billionaire jumped up to go to the well-stocked minibar that he had somehow managed to sneak into the original S.H.I.E.L.D./Stark Inc. business contract as a potential deal-breaking clause should said item not be made available to one Anthony Stark on all S.H.I.E.L.D. premises. From what Clint understood, the S.H.I.E.L.D. legal department had spent months fighting dirty to get the clause voided but had only managed to amend it somewhat so that certain exceptions and a 'within reason' sub-clause had been added.

Natasha gave a brief nod at Pym, telling him to start packing the equipment up. Clint rolled his shoulders and started for the cockpit.

"_Agent Barton?" _Sam Winchester's voice cut suddenly through the silence of the jet. "_I hope you got everything you needed." _Stark actually stopped mid-pour and Natasha turned whip fast back towards the speaker.

"_We'll send you all the relevant information we dig up as soon possible. As for your end, if you could create a timeline for the days up to the incident for both the dead guy and Doctor Strange, we'd appreciate it."_

They could hear a faint rumble and then a deep purr from a powerful engine in the background and Dean's voice yelling, "_Sammy! Come on!"_

"_Oh and one last thing. If you so much as think of betraying us or double cross us in _any_ way, you won't live very long to regret it."_ The threat was delivered with ice-cold menace, made all the more chilling by the way Sam's voice had gone from business friendly to deadly in a heartbeat._ "And it won't be me or even Cas you'll have to worry about. It'll be Dean, and trust me when I tell you that my brother is the single scariest person I've ever met. And I once spent eight months with Lucifer talking in my head."_

"_I'm looking forward to meeting you." _And with that Sam Winchester left, audibly slamming the barn door closed after him.

Staring at the now silent speaker, Hawkeye felt his shoulders tense up again. Sam and Dean Winchester were definitely as dangerous as their files had indicated. Possibly even more so.

Fuck.

* * *

><p><strong>References:<strong> I've decided to move any and all explaining comments about the various references in each chapter to the end so as to avoid spoilers. As for this chapter in a couple of "blink or you'll miss it" cameos I proudly present references to Frank Deveroux (crazy conspiracy guy from season 7 of Supernatural) and Barney Barton older brother of Hawkeye and all-round douchebag._  
><em>


	5. Chapter 5 - Tangled Webs

**Warnings: **Once again pretty mild. There is even less swearing than usual.

**Disclaimer:** I make no profit yadda yadda copyright yadda yadda. You guys know the drill.

**Author's Note: **Well what do you know, you guys get an early Christmas present! Okay, pathetic attempt at putting a positive spin on my _extreme_ lateness in updating this little pet project of mine aside, I'd just like to start by saying sorry, my bad! Mea culpa! Désolé! Undskyld! Förlåt! Scusi! **ごめんなさい****!** Aaand that's about as many languages as I can 'sorry' in at the top of my head.

For those of you who do not care one whit _why_ I've been awol since summer, by all means go straight on to the story, in fact I encourage this approach wholeheartedly.

But should any of you still feel slightly disgruntled and or mildly curious, I am turning around and shamelessly pointing my finger at the fact that this semester I've attempted to juggle one full time job, one part time job, a full class load at Uni (so far I've uncovered a deep hatred for multinominal logistic regression), volunteer work and evening classes. It has _not _been pretty – in fact concepts such as "weekends" and "days off" have completely disappeared from my vocabulary. On the plus side, I am now on first name basis with about a dozen murderers (long story). So yeah, bottom line: I've been _ridiculously_ busy.

Anyway, enjoy and thanks for sticking with the story!

Oh and the forecast for my next semester is nowhere as insane as this one, so barring a zombie apocalypse, I should get back on track with updating like a normal person again soon.

* * *

><p><strong>Chapter 5 – Tangled Webs<strong>

"So, what's our status?" Captain America asked, dispensing with the ceremony that usually accompanied the official start of an Avengers meeting.

Natasha Romanoff leaned subtly back in her seat and let her eyes sweep over the assembled avengers. The disheveled and worn group of people sitting around the big conference table were a far cry from the glossy images of 'Earth's Mightiest Heroes' that the world had gotten used to seeing plastered on giant billboards and the front page of Times Magazine. If only the reporters could see them now; they would have a field day.

Cap and Banner were still covered in sand and dust from their last mission. At least Banner looked slightly more respectable, having had the chance to change into a new set of clothes, unlike Cap, whose uniform had turned from star-spangled to an unflattering beige along with his skin and hair.

Janet, also better known as the Wasp and currently the Avengers' only other female member, was slumped in her seat half asleep, head resting precariously in her hands, while her husband sat stiffly next to her. Pym's face was pale and drawn but the scientist's eyes burned with a manic intensity that was more than a little disconcerting.

Even Thor was beginning to look slightly frayed around the edges, as the stress and lack of sleep of the last five days were catching up to him. Barton on the other hand looked more or less like as he always did. Well, except for the dark shadows under his eyes, which had changed from their usual purplish shade to near black.

As much as she tried to fight it, the Widow's eyes were inexorably drawn past her fellow team members to the two vacant seats around the big conference table.

The first empty chair, situated between Hawkeye and Pym, was almost like an open wound, raw and painful, serving as a constant reminder of the reason why this emergency meeting had been called.

The other missing presence, while no less glaring, had merely elicited an irritated twitch of Captain America's lips when he'd first walked in.

Natasha had prudently instructed Jarvis to wake Tony as soon as she had received Cap and Banner's ETA 30 minutes prior, but she estimated that the billionaire would need at least another 10 minutes to make himself presentable after last night's bender. The fact that no one had commented on Stark's tardiness showed just how used to this sort of behavior the team had gotten over the last couple of months.

"Well," Hawkeye drawled in response to Cap's question when no one else spoke up. "By my estimation we are royally screwed." He plunked his feet up on the table and gave the room a mirthless smile.

"The Sikh was our last half-decent lead," Pym agreed with a meaningful glance at the exhausted-looking Captain America.

Rogers and Banner had spent the last 24 hours chasing down one of Strange's associates in Oman. 'The Sikh', as he was simply known, had been rumored to have information about the Sorcerer Supreme's disappearance. Unfortunately it had turned out to be a dead end. Literally.

On top of that, the two Avengers had also ended up being grounded for more than half a day due to the sudden and unpredictable arrival of a sandstorm, wasting even more precious hours they really couldn't afford to lose.

From what Natasha had gathered from the very brief and shouty conversation she had had with a harried Cap over the static of the storm, Banner had actually hulked out from sheer frustration. Natasha had been unable to tell whether the ear-deafening roar in the background had been from the Hulk, the sandstorm or a combination of the two. In any case, she had added Sohar to the, by now, depressingly long list of international cities where the Avengers were no longer welcome.

"What's the status on Coulson and his team? Have they got anything?" Banner asked in a subdued voice while absently trying to rub a spot of dirt the back of his hand.

Natasha's eyes narrowed. She could tell from Bruce's hunched body language, his refusal to meet anyone's eyes and the way he kept fidgeting with his hands, that the scientist was well on his way to sliding into one of his signature post-hulk funks. Usually the team could handle a depressed Banner, but right now the timing could not be worse, and from the subtle hints of shame and guilt she could read in his down-turned expression, it was obvious that Bruce himself was only all too aware of this fact.

"No. No luck so far," Natasha shook her head. "Although Agent Skye said that she'd keep an ear to the ground."

Not that she was holding her breath. So far, every single lead they had followed had turned out to be a wild goose chase and they were no closer to finding Strange now than when they started five, almost six, days ago.

Cap's shoulders slumped and the Widow mentally sympathized with his disappointment. They desperately needed to catch a break. Cap closed his eye and ran a weary hand through his hair, causing a small shower of sand to dislodge and pitter-patter onto the polished wood of the conference table, every line of stress and fatigue drawn by the last week standing out starkly on his face even through the dusky layer of grime.

Natasha suddenly had to fight a vicious battle with her Black Widow conditioning. _Weakness,_ her old Red Room training whispered seductively from the back of her mind. _Use it. Exploit the opening and strike! _She ruthlessly crushed the predatory thought, angry that she had allowed it to surface in the first place. She usually had much better control; she was slipping.

In the brief second it took to her get her instincts under control, Cap had squared his shoulders again and had returned to being every inch the stoic leader. He cleared his throat. "All right," he turned to face Janet. "What about Clea? Have we gotten anything... usable from her?"

When the Wasp realized the question had been aimed at her, she glanced up from her slumped position. While all the Avengers looked tired, Janet looked like she had aged ten years in the past five days. The change was made all the more jarring because of the care the petite superheroine usually took with her appearance. Gone were the tasteful makeup and perfectly coiffed hair and chipper smile; instead her skin was sallow, her eyes red-rimmed and bloodshot from lack of sleep or crying or both and she had bitten her lip bloody.

"No. Nothing. She's completely gone." She displayed her bare arms which were crisscrossed with raised fingernail scratches, most of which had drawn blood. Her eyes when she looked at the Avengers were haunted. "And I think she might be getting worse."

Pym, in a rare display of affection, reached out and grasped his wife's hand in support. Natasha made a mental note to make sure Janet was relieved of her current duty of monitoring Strange's wife, Clea, who had mysteriously – and suspiciously – gone stark mad the day after her husband's disappearance. Natasha had only met the woman twice but the impression she had gotten was that of a strong, proud and dignified woman; a far cry from the raving lunatic that was currently locked in a secure S.H.I.E.L.D. holding cell, screaming about fire and blood.

A despondent silence fell over the Avengers in the wake of the Wasp's last statement.

It was Thor who finally broke it."Ill fortune has indeed fallen upon the Sorcerer's house," he mused somberly."But what of the warriors we were instructed to seek?" The Norse god looked hopefully at the two S.H.I.E.L.D. agents. "Were you able to able to succeed in this task that thwarted even Heimdall?"

Natasha shared a brief look with Barton. He had made his feelings on the Winchesters perfectly clear on the flight back to the Tower. In his opinion they were simply too dangerous to trust. Natasha didn't necessarily disagree, but she, _they_, were desperate.

"We believe we have found them, yes," she said. "And they are willing to help us."

"This is truly good news," Thor said in relief, the first genuine smile in days lighting up his face.

"But...?" Rogers prompted sensing her unvoiced hesitation.

"But they're a wild card. And we're running out of time, we cannot afford to make a wrong move now."

Truthfully she knew that the odds of finding Strange alive at this point were almost nonexistent. She knew that using the Winchester brothers was a desperate and risky gamble, one that they would most likely all come to regret. She also knew that there was no real choice.

A long shot was better than no shot, even when the gun was in the hand of two seasoned killers whose intentions were murky at best, and who were just as likely to turn the barrel back on the Avengers as they were to help.

Still, the concerns needed to be voiced.

"We are also running out of options," Cap reminded her in a tired voice.

"We must trust in the Völve. Her prophecies have never been wrong," Thor proclaimed.

When the warrior god had returned suddenly from his latest visit to Asgard and announced that he had received an urgent message from some sort of ancient Norse seeress, instructing the Avengers to find two warriors who would help them save the Sorcerer Supreme,_ before_ they even knew Strange had gone missing, the team had been more than a little skeptical. Not in the least because this message had supposedly been delivered by an immortal squirrel by the name of Ratatoskr, whatever that meant.

At the same time, Thor had been uncharacteristically reticent on the nature of this Völve, insisting only that she was ancient and that all of Asgard heeded her every word. Even Odin bowed his head when she chose to speak. Which was apparently only once every few hundred years and only when a great cataclysmic change was about to take place. The fact that the Völve had never before meddled directly in the affairs of Midgard had also been troubling enough to etch a permanent frown of worry on Thor's face.

"If she says we will need these warriors to rescue our lost comrade then it is so," the Asgardian stated with unwavering conviction.

"No offense big guy, but in that case, I say your fortuneteller definitely needs to clean her magic eight ball," came Stark's unmistakable drawl from the door. Despite the snark, there was a hard edge to his voice.

The billionaire stalked into the room like he owned it, which he technically did, completely ignoring Rogers' disapproving glare and Janet's wane welcoming smile. However, instead of taking a seat, he walked straight up to Natasha and leaned over her, every line of his body a clear challenge.

"So... I just learned something very interesting," he said, the barely restrained anger in his eyes at odds with his casual tone. "As it turns out, our new assets are_fucking_ _psycho_ _serial killers_!" The sentence might have started out somewhat calm but it ended in a heated shout.

Although Tony had bags under his eyes, still smelled of booze and had patches of stubble on his chin left over from a bad shave job, Natasha couldn't help but be forcibly reminded that this was a man who, behind his eccentric drunken playboy image, was in effect one of the most powerful men on the planet. It was easy to forget sometimes, but deep down Tony Stark had a core of cold, hard titanium-enforced steel and while it was exceedingly rare to see him truly angry, when it did happen, he was a force to reckoned with. And right now he was _pissed_.

The Black Widow raised her left eyebrow.

"Stark," she warned evenly. "You want to take a step back. Now."

It took a long second before whatever scraps of self preservation Stark could muster finally kicked in and he backed down. Changing tactics, he instead turned to face the Avengers as a whole.

"I don't know about you guys, but I generally prefer to know that the people I'm working with aren't, and I'm sorry if I'm repeating myself here, but really I cannot stress this little detail enough, _evil_ _mass murdering psychopaths._" He flung his arms out for emphasis.

In the slightly stunned silence that followed Tony's last outburst, Natasha made sure her face was carefully blank. One by one, she felt the heavy gazes of the Avengers sitting around the table fall on her. For some reason, although she and Clint had run this op together, they all instinctively turned to her for answers. A very tiny voice in the back her head pointed out that that really wasn't fair.

"Agent Romanoff?" Cap looked grim. He briefly caught her gaze, a silent plea in his eyes that this not be what it sounded like.

After another measured beat of silence, Natasha turned, facing Stark head on, and shrugged: "That information was deemed 'need to know only'."

Stark's indignant cry of "Are you kidding me?" served as a go-ahead for the rest of the group and the room quickly devolved into people yelling and talking over each other.

Thor was gesturing wildly at Pym, loudly refuting that the Völve would lead them astray. Banner and Janet had turned on an increasingly tense looking Hawkeye demanding answers, while Tony had engaged in a rather one-sided shouting match with Natasha.

"Quiet!" Captain America finally roared, slapping both hands loudly down on the table and dislodging another shower of sand. "We are _not_ squabbling children. So start acting like adults."

"Now, Stark sit your ass down," he ordered in the sudden and slightly shameful silence that followed. Stark reluctantly sat down, though it was clear he was still fuming.

"Natasha explain."

Allowing herself a mental sigh and another sideway glance at Clint, Natasha measured her words.

"The... instructions... we were given lead us to Dean and Sam Winchester. Brothers, and yes, currently on the FBI's most wanted list," she admitted. The situations had already spun out of control thanks to Stark and his pathological need to know everything. She had originally hoped to have an opportunity to brief Steve privately before this blew up in their faces, but now all she could hope for was damage control.

"For what crimes exactly?" Banner demanded, his expression dark. Thankfully there was no hint of green in his complexion. Yet.

Tony snorted and opened his mouth, presumably to expound on the Winchesters' long and colorful rap sheet.

"Top three? Murder, kidnapping, bank robbery," Barton answered for her, cutting Stark off before he had a chance to start. "I believe terrorism was also mentioned, but those charges were later dropped."

From the clipped, matter-of-fact way Clint spoke, Natasha could tell he had gone back into agent mode. That made things easier on her. While Clint could be a hothead, Hawkeye was a consummate professional. He would back whatever play she decided on without question, so long as it didn't jeopardy the mission or the team, irrespective of his personal feelings.

"And you decided to approach them anyway? Without consulting the rest of the team." Pym's hands were clenched in anger and it was now Janet's turn to reach out and soothe her husband.

"A thorough risk assessment was performed and the op was deemed to be within acceptable parameters." Hawkeye didn't back down as he recited the standard, patent pending, S.H.I.E.L.D. bullshit line.

"That's bullshit and you know it," Stark immediately called him on it. "Fuck it Barton, you basically lied right to my face."

"Were you even planning on telling us or were you just gonna wait until one of us got stabbed in the back by our new associates?" Pym asked, righteous anger turning his pale cheeks red.

"And what else aren't you telling us?" Banner interjected.

Allowing her partner to take point and field the hits for the moment, the Widow used the brief respite to regroup. This was going nowhere and she needed to regain control of the situation.

Before Hawkeye had a chance to respond, she broke in, "Guys?"

Gauging the mood in the room, the Widow consciously softened her face and body language, allowing a hint of the fatigue she was in truth feeling to shine through, making her appear more vulnerable.

"Let's just take a deep breath. We're all tired and frustrated." She waited until she had everybody's undivided attention. "Yes, we decided to wait disclosing information that had not yet been verified and which might have been completely irrelevant. And yes, that turned out to be the wrong call."

She noted that Stark and Cap seemed to calm, deflating slightly at her words. Letting her shoulders slump artfully, she made sure to wince slightly, reminding everybody that she had had a venomous four inch fang sticking out of her collarbone not three weeks ago.

Clint twitched his hand which for him was the equivalence of an eye roll at her, to his eyes, obvious ploy. Thor on the other hand actually reached out for her in obvious worry and she had to smile and wave his concern off.

"But this isn't getting us anywhere," she pointed out in a soft and reasonable tone designed to be a sharp counterpoint to the angry atmosphere. "We still need to decide what our game plan is."

She could tell that she had won, when Cap finally sat down again and ran another tired hand across his face.

"This discussion is not over," he warned her in a low voice. She simply nodded and made sure to keep all emotions off of her face except for a hint of contrition and relief.

Stark huffed. Pym was still seething though, but then again the scientist had always seemed worryingly immune to her manipulations.

"All right, have you had any contact with the – what was the name again?"

"Winchesters" Banner supplied.

"Winchesters, thanks, since the meeting?" Cap asked.

"We're still waiting to hear back from them. But we're expecting contact within the next few hours." Hawkeye had relaxed back in his seat, tension still visible in the way he held himself but at least he had broken off the aggressive staring match with Pym.

"They appeared to recognize several of the symbols from Strange's apartment." Natasha pointed out.

"They also appeared to be batshit crazy not to mention homicidal," Stark grumbled.

"Do you believe they can help?" Janet spoke up and with one question cut to the heart of the matter.

Under normal circumstance the Black Widow would never have accepted, let alone lobbied for an alliance with the likes of Sam and Dean Winchester. She would have found another way, tapped another resource, or simply trusted in the Avengers and their almost miraculous ability to save the day no matter what. These were not normal circumstances however, and the stakes were simply too high.

Natasha took her own nagging doubts, the unease in Hawkeye's cold soldier eyes and Hill's slightly nauseous look after she had handed them the Winchester files and buried them deep down. This was the tipping point and she could not afford to waver.

"Yes."

The word hung for a moment in the room.

There was no room for mistakes. Or doubts. They needed a miracle and the Winchesters had better be the ones to deliver it or she would personally make them it bitterly.

After all, this was not only about saving Strange – in the grand scheme of things he was just one man, and while his loss was by no means insignificant, it paled in comparison to what was really at stake: The future the Avengers.

The simple truth was that the team could afford to lose another member. Not so soon after Bobbi. The cracks were already showing, near invisible fault lines running deep within the core of the team spiraling outwards from the hole left by Bobbi's smile, and all it would take was one more blow aimed just right to shatter the Initiative for good.

There was nothing the Black Widow wouldn't do to prevent that from happening. Even if it meant shaking hands with the Devil himself.

Once again she cursed Mockingbird's arrogance and stupidity in allowing herself to get killed. Cursed her for dying the way she had and for dealing the team a wound that Natasha was afraid could never fully be healed.

"This is not a choice I can make. This needs to be a team decision." Captain America slowly looked around the table, catching each person's eyes in turn.

"Do we put our chips on the Winchesters or keep looking for another option? One man, one vote. Majority rules."

Thor, who had mostly kept silent, rose from his chair. "Despite what has come to light, I have faith in the Völve. I vote yay."

Banner shook his head, "I have to believe that there's another way. No."

"Hell no." Stark voted emphatically. "I am not about to declare moral bankruptcy. I won't work with killers." The billionaire crossed his arms and sat back scowling.

If it hadn't been counterproductive, Natasha might have felt tempted to call Stark on his hypocrisy – after all what did he think that she and Clint were?

Instead she lifted her hand and calmly pointed out, "I believe I've already made my stance clear."

Hawkeye sighed deeply and leaned slightly forward, "What she said." he pointed to Natasha, unhappiness ghosting across his face.

"Big suprise," Stark mumbled under his breath.

Janet seemed undecided for a moment before she looked down at her arms. When she looked up again, resolve shone from her pinched face. "I vote yes."

Pym scowled and gave his wife a look of betrayal. "No," he spat.

"That is four for, three against." Cap summed up, looking even more exhausted than when the meeting had started.

"So what's it gonna be Rogers?" Stark asked. In case of a tie, Rogers' vote counted double courtesy of him being the official leader of the Avengers, which meant that the decision, for all intents and purposes, now rested fully on his shoulders.

The ex-soldier rose slowly and assumed his usual parade rest stance, hands behind his back, and lifted his head.

"When the Winchesters make contact, tell them that we'll send a jet to pick them up. We have work to do and we can't afford to waste any more time."

With that Captain America turned around and walked out, signaling the end to the meeting.

* * *

><p><strong>References: <strong>Once again Bobbi Morse aka Mockingbird makes an appearance, at least in spirit (I'd just like to point out that I introduced her_way_ before Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. did). Apropos the TV series, I also included a nod or two to Coulson and his new primetime team. Lastly I've also chosen to draw on the character Clea from the comic universe to flesh out Dr. Strange a bit. Don't worry, you don't need to know who she is to understand what is going on since I am going to change her quite a bit anyway. Also the Völve and Ratatoskr are both borrowed entities from Norse mythology and are not specific to the Marvel Universe.

As a final note, I apologize for the fact that this is a decidedly Winchester light chapter, especially in lieu of the long wait. I have a plan mapped out for this story though (or at least 85% of a plan), and I am not willing to compromise or skip stuff no matter the circumstances. Next chapter should make everybody happy though!


	6. Chapter 6 - Mark of the Red Hourglass

**Warnings: **This chapter does go a bit dark with mentions of sexual abuse of a child, medical procedures without consent, mental illnesses and alcoholism to name a few. Although I should point out that none of it is _too_ graphic.

**Disclaimer:** I just checked and nope, I still don't own anything or make any profit from this story.

**Author's Note: **I am officially just going to stop making promises about being better at posting this story regularly. I will do my very best, but life and all her pesky friends keep getting in my way.

Oh and the Widow sort of hijacked this chapter, but I've always felt she getting the short end of the stick by often being relegated a sidekick to the other characters so I figured it was time to give her a little bit of attention.

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><p><strong>Chapter 6 - Mark of the Red Hourglass<strong>

As it turned out, the brothers did _not_ accept Captain America's offer to have a jet come pick them up and bring them to the Tower.

In fact, Sam Winchester had scoffed at the idea and mumbled something about the likelihood of pigs flying before his brother did and besides there was no way he could convince Dean to leave Baby behind. And anyway, they'd just crossed the state line between Pennsylvania and New Jersey so they'd be there in oh, a couple of hours, so yeah thanks but no thanks.

While Clint dealt with the youngest Winchester on the phone, Natasha had been running a trace on the call and although the Winchesters were good, Jarvis was in a completely different league, which meant that it had taken the AI all of ten seconds to cut through the layers of encryption and dummy proxies to get the brothers' real location; which happened to be an underground parking lot less than five blocks south of the Tower.

The Widow was not particularly surprised. Showing up early to do reckon and set up an escape route was the smart move and so far the Winchesters had proven themselves both shrewd and capable players. She didn't even consider their actions a breach of trust. After all she would have done the exact same thing herself. However, she was slightly curious as to how they had managed the scrambled GPS setup in the first place. There was nothing in their background to suggest this kind of technical savvy. An associate maybe? Whoever had written the program had to be a near genius to stall Jarvis even for a few seconds.

After ending the brief call, Hawkeye ambled up to her. "Seems our guests are a bit confused about their location," he deadpanned with a nod at the screen showing the Winchesters' position as a lazily blinking red dot in downtown Manhattan. "Want me to go pick them to make sure they don't get lost on the way here?" The question was asked with a completely straight face, but she knew him well enough to tell that he was only half-joking.

"Play nice," Natasha murmured. She had no doubt Clint would've loved nothing more than to escort the brothers at arrowpoint through the lobby. Somehow the Winchesters had managed to get under Barton's skin during their brief meeting and the archer had a nasty habit of making life a living hell for anyone who crossed him. It probably hadn't helped the Winchesters' case that she had forced him to vouch for them at the meeting when the agent would much rather drop them into one of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s secure containment cells at the bottom of the Mariana Trench and throw away the key.

"Buzzkill," Barton muttered under his breath.

"Let's wait them out," she decided. "Calling their bluff now will only make them defensive and tip our hand." Playing along with the Winchesters' little ruse would also allow the Avengers a few more hours of rest.

Clint reluctantly grunted his consent although he still cast a plaintive glance at his bow.

"Did you have fun briefing Fury?" Natasha deftly changed the subject and flashed him a small evil grin.

The only reason Clint wasn't huddled up in one of his nests sound asleep right now was because he had only just returned from a brief trip to HQ. The dubious honor of bringing the famously ill-tempered director of S.H.I.E.L.D. up to speed on their current progress had fallen to Hawkeye after the Widow had ruthlessly crushed him a short but intense game of rock-paper-scissors.

Every once in a while having been raised by a government program that specialized in psychological warfare and mind games had its perks. Although her old instructor in the Art of Manipulations had probably never imagined that her lessons would be used to cheat in an inane children's game.

Hawkeye sent her a dark look. "Remember the betting pool that's been going around?"

Natasha rolled her eyes. Not that she really cared, but it did seem slightly disloyal for her fellow agents to be actively betting on which of the Avengers was going to bite the dust next.

Hawkeye winced slightly, "Yeah, so apparently Fury found out."

Ouch. She almost felt a little bad for sending Clint into the lion's den. Almost.

"And now Hill's the only one who dares to go into his office which means she's basically been demoted to his personal assistant. And you know Maria..."

The level of bitchiness had to be nearing nuclear.

"You owe me big time Tasha," Clint pointed out. "You're doing all of the paperwork once this mess is over _and_ you're cooking me dinner."

Considering his terms for a moment, she held out her arm, first clenched in the starting position, a rare glint of humor in her eyes. "Double or nothing?" She offered sweetly.

"Yeah, like I'm gonna fall for that again," he snorted and flashed her an honest to god vintage Clint Barton grin. It was like a sudden ray of sunlight breaking through a dark cloud, and if something tight and long-petrified loosened in her chest just for a second, the Widow was careful not to put a name to it.

Although she would never admit it, she had missed this sort of easy banter between them. To her that was Clint's true superpower; not his perfect aim, but the way he always made her feel more grounded and connected, almost like she was a real person with real feelings.

However, just as quickly as it had appeared, the levity drained from him as the weight of the situation once again pressed down, the warmth and light of the small moment snuffed out in an instant. "I'm trashed. Think I'm gonna go catch some rack time. Wake me when they make their move." Barton gestured vaguely at the screen tracking the Winchesters' location.

The Black Widow didn't bother tracking him as he disappeared quickly and almost completely soundlessly into the nearest ceiling vent.

Instead she sighed and went over to the kitchen to reboil the kettle of water that had been forgotten and left to cool after Barton's arrival and the phone call from Sam Winchester. Sipping her tea she sat down in front of the screen and fixated on the small blinking dot while trying to quiet the growing cacophony of voices in her head.

She had managed to snatch almost five hours of sleep in the twelve hours the Avengers had been waiting for the Winchesters to make contact, and with her augmented physique that was really all she needed – at least for the next day or two. This was also the reason why she was currently on monitor duty while the rest of the team was resting up, or in Tony's case attempting to skim through more than a decade's worth of case files on the Winchesters. Well, that and the fact that nobody trusted Thor to take a message.

However, the chaos of the past six days meant that she was long overdue for her daily meditation exercises. She needed time and quiet to sort and soothe and redraw the boundaries.

She remembered Clint once asking her if she knew what it was like to be unmade, to have someone play with her brain, to take her out and stuff something else inside instead. As she had watched the last vestiges of blue fading from his eyes only to be replaced with sick horror and self-loathing, the heart she was not supposed to have had ached for him.

Of course she knew. She was a daughter of the Red Room. She had a hundred voices in her head and none of them were her own.

Although she had lived and worked with them for years, none of the Avengers fully grasped who, or rather what, they had invited into their home. Most days she felt like a wolf in sheep's clothing. Clint might have an inkling, and she knew that Fury had a file locked away somewhere with pages so heavily redacted that the black ink had saturated the paper and would stain the hands of anyone who tried to read it. Still, none of them knew what her being the Black Widow _truly_ meant.

During her first year in the Red Room, before she had been selected for the advanced program, there had been brainwashing. It had been crude but effective. Endless mantras drilled so deeply into her impressionable young mind that they had been indelibly embedded into her neural networks and she would mumble them in her sleep.

Later, when the scientists had finally realized that in order to reach their goal of creating a new breed of super spies they needed to first start with a blank slate, Natalia Alianovna Romanova had been designated 'test subject 27' and taken from her bed in the dormitory to a bright lab.

There had been syringes filled with murky amber liquids and alien metal instruments and a strange pale electricity that had hummed softly as wave after wave of golden electrons had coursed through her cerebral cortex, gently and thoroughly erasing everything in their path.

When it was all over, she had woken up alone strapped to a bed with a half congealed glob of blood and gritty pieces of baby teeth in her mouth and a terrible, yawning emptiness where her memories and sense of self used to be.

At first she had been terrified of the echoing darkness in her mind. She had flailed, blind panic overpowering her senses, until she had finally noticed the faint but steady chant of a handful of phrases playing over and over in the back of her mind:

_Never show fear. Never hesitate. Never show mercy. Never disobey._

_Weakness is death. Failure is death. Disobedience is death._

Somehow the most basic of tenets from the early brainwashing had survived the electric purge that had swept everything else away. She had clung to them like a lifeline, using them to stave off the madness that claimed almost nine out of ten of the girls who managed to survive the Tabula Rasa procedure in the first place.

In the years that followed, the mantras became her mental anchor point, the one constant in psyche that was forever in flux and where memories were fluid and treacherous things that could never be trusted. Natasha had quickly come to envy the ease with which ordinary people distinguished between reality and fantasy.

For instance, she clearly remembered spending her seventh birthday in Disneyland with her older sister and parents and throwing a tantrum when her mother wouldn't let her enter the Haunted Mansion. But she had also spent her seventh birthday begging for scraps on the steps of a train station in the slums of the Putuo District in Shanghai. Yet at the same time she vividly remembered sitting numb with fright on a cot in her underwear, waiting for her very first costumer, while the new girl sobbed in the cubicle next to hers.

Of course she knew that the memories were false, implanted by technology that was not human in origin. She was neither American, Chinese nor Indian after all. Her name was not Sarah or Xiu or Neti even though she had their voices and memories in her head. She knew this rationally, but it was still Sarah's flair for the dramatic that made her dip the extra inch when she danced with a mark. It was Xiu's remembered delight the first time she had tasted chocolate that made Natasha keep a secret stash of cheap Chinese milk chocolate in her room and it was Neti's horror and revulsion that still made her nauseous whenever she smelled curry and sweat.

Threaded through the slightly too-bright technicolor memories of other people were vague and hazy images of monotonous gray walls, unforgiving blue training mats, harsh voices giving orders and pale girls with grim faces and dark shadows under their eyes.

By the time Natasha had graduated from the Black Widow program, she had mastered a series of meditation techniques that kept the warring voices and clashing personalities in a delicate system of checks and balances. As long as she didn't lose her mental equilibrium, she could continue to spin the shifting mosaic of different personality facets into the single cohesive identity of Natasha Romanoff, agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., codename Black Widow and founding member of the Avengers.

All it took was practice and the exercise of mental control. Well that and peace and quiet. Taking a deep breath, Natasha closed her eyes and, as she breathed out, slowly lowered her mental walls and unbolted the mental locks before allowing herself to be swallowed up by the maelstrom.

When Sam and Dean Winchester strolled into the lobby of the Avengers Tower almost exactly two hours later, the Black Widow's mind was mirror calm and her abandoned tea was stone cold.

As soon as the brothers had started to move, Natasha had summoned the Avengers to the conference room and most of them had arrived already.

"So that's them, huh?" Banner commented softly. The scientist squinted at the live security feed from the lobby and Jarvis obligingly zeroed in on the two brothers, blowing them up on the screen in the conference room before running a quick facial scan to confirm their identities.

"Yup. That's them." It was a testament to years of cohabitation that none of the gathered Avengers flinched as Barton suddenly appeared from the ceiling and jumped down on the table before nimbly climbing into his usual chair.

"Not quite what I was expecting," Bruce shrugged as the video showed Sam Winchester dressed in an ill-fitting suit, flashing a dimpled smile at the receptionist.

"Yeah well, they probably left their bloody hatchet at home," Stark said, pointedly ignoring the new addition of dirty shoe prints to his conference table.

"Actually sir, the security scan shows several metallic items in Mr. Winchester's bags one of which roughly match the dimensions of a hatchet," came Jarvis polished voice from the hidden speakers in the room.

"They brought weapons with them?" Cap frowned and pushed past Tony to get a closer look at the screen and the two heavy looking duffel bags slung over the shoulder of Dean Winchester.

"Yes sir, quite a collection or so the scans would indicate."

"It's not really a problem," Natasha quickly interjected.

"Of course not. I always ask killers to bring their murder kit with them when I invite them over for a social visit," Stark commented sarcastically.

Before she could retort, the billionaire held up a finger, "You know what, never mind." He pulled out his phone and flicked it a few times before mumbling a quick order into the microphone. Stark turned back to the screen and almost instantaneously two immaculately dressed security guards (both former MI6 agents because apparently Tony thought that their accents were cool) appeared as if from thin air and approached the Winchesters gesturing for the bags. Even without audio it was obvious that the Winchesters were not happy but after a shared look Dean handed over the duffel bags with a cardboard fake smile. Natasha noted that the security guard's knees buckled slightly at the weight before he managed to compensate.

The receptionist then lead them to the waiting elevator and punched in the 12-digit code that would allow them to go all the way to the top. She smiled coquettishly and looked over her shoulder as she walked back to her desk and Natasha caught Sam elbowing Dean to make him enter the elevator instead of ogling her assets.

"Excuse me Sir, I feel I should point out that Mr. and Mr. Winchester still have several weapons concealed on their persons," Jarvis informed them as they watched the brothers fidget awkwardly in the elevator as it rose past the first twenty floors.

"Fine. Whatever," Stark gave up. "But I'm sleeping in my suit. Oh and Jarvis, please raise the threat level to four and implement security protocols 13 through 28."

"Very well, sir." The AI acknowledged.

Natasha rolled her eyes at the billionaire's paranoia and quickly caught Barton's attention to make sure he remembered that the air ducts were now off limits due to Jarvis' new 'shoot first and ask question later" orders.

From the way Hawkeye was surreptitiously rubbing the hidden scar on his hip from where one of Jarvis' security lasers had clipped him last time protocol 22 had been enacted, he remembered just fine.

"Where are Janet and Hank?" Cap asked the AI, noting the couple's continued absence.

"Ah, Mr. Pym politely declined to come and welcome our new visitors," Jarvis reported, the slight hesitation in his tone hinting that the scientist's refusal had probably not been very polite. "And Miss van Dyne is currently sleeping. I deemed it better not to disturb her."

"All right," Cap nodded his approval of the AI's decision.

"Thor was consulting with Asgard when I called him. He should be down any minute," Natasha preempted Cap's next question.

With everybody more or less accounted for, Cap looked over his team. "Okay then. Let's do this." He walked out and headed for the elevator. As the rest of the Avengers filed out behind him, Natasha grabbed hold of Stark.

"Play nice," she said in a low voice meant only for his ears. "Or I'll send the security footage of your lab from last night to Pepper." Stark froze and then visibly flinched at the thought of his former girlfriend seeing him passed out drunk on the floor, buried under a mountain of dirty shop towels and scraps of cloth that his robotic minions led by Dummy had lovingly if misguidedly piled on top of him in lieu of a blanket.

"You wouldn't dare," he hissed, a hint of panic mixed in with his outrage.

"Try me."

He glowered at her, something close to hate flashing in his eyes, but apparently decided not to call her bluff.

And it was a bluff. Natasha had already sent the CEO of Stark Industries an anonymous email with a solitary video file attached. At the very least, Natasha calculated that seeing Tony at his most pathetic would help soften Pepper's resolve. Hopefully it would even make her reconsider her ultimatum.

Personally Natasha thought Pepper had been right to cut her losses, but once again the bigger picture easily trumped the emotional well being of one CEO. And in the bigger picture, Iron Man was needed. Not Tony the inventor or Stark the billionaire but Iron Man the icon, and while Stark had previously managed to walk the fine line of being a functional alcoholic, Bobbi's death and Pepper subsequently leaving him had finally pushed him well over the edge.

Natasha gave him less than six months before he got either himself or another team member killed. So far she had been working double time to keep that from happening – she'd be damned if she was going to let the sniveling bean-counters from accounting win the pool – but if something didn't change soon _measures_ would have to be taken.

But that was a crisis for another day. And unless they managed to rescue Strange, all her worries might prove to be moot.

Brushing past a fuming Stark, she casually took her place next to Barton.

Then the elevator dinged and its two occupants stepped out and was met with the impressive sight of five Avengers.

There was a slight pause as everybody seized everybody else up and Natasha was certain that neither Dean Winchester's slightly awestruck eyes or the narrowed gaze of Sam Winchester missed much. Then Captain America broke the moment by stepping forward and offering his hand to the elder Winchester.

"Welcome to the Avengers," Rogers said in his best Captain America voice, and with only a quick sidelong glance at Stark continued, "We've heard a lot about you."

Apparently completely oblivious to the tension practically thrumming through the air, Dean looked frozen for a second before he eagerly gripped Rogers' hand and, with a wide eyed sidelong glance of his own at his brother, started to shake it vigorously.

"Dude, I'm actually shaking _Captain America's freaking hand_," Dean whispered loudly out of the corner of his mouth and Sam had the grace to look slightly embarrassed on behalf of his brother. Dean, Natasha noted, had still not let go of Rogers' hand.

When the moment stretched on without any indication that Dean was planning on releasing Steve, Sam quickly cleared his throat and stepped in.

"Nice to meet you to," he nodded at the captain before turning his attention to Hawkeye. "Agent Barton," he acknowledged and wonder of wonders Clint actually responded with a slight nod of his own and a smile that might have been slightly closer to the baring of teeth than a friendly greeting, but Natasha would take what she could get.

In the meantime, Steve had managed to extract himself from Dean and, exhibiting the same brand of bravery that had made him deliberately crash his plane into the Arctic Ocean, chose to offer his appendage up again to the other Winchester.

Sam shook it perfunctorily although Natasha could see that even the younger Winchester wasn't completely immune to the awe of being in this close proximity to a living legend.

"I believe you've already met Iron Man," Cap pointed at Stark who was holding himself very stiffly and whose face was carefully blank.

Sam hid it well, but there was just the faintest hint of shame in his expression as he shook hands with the billionaire.

At the mention of Iron Man, Dean finally managed to drag his eyes away from Captain America and his face split open in a happy grin. "Hiya, Tony," he said latching on to a new hand and shaking it vigorously. "We go way back," he joked lamely at the group. Dean's happiness quickly faltered however, when Stark did not return his enthusiastic greeting and in fact took an involuntary step back before jerking his hand back.

Natasha made a mental note to have Jarvis record Tony's reaction when he found out she had sent the video to Pepper. She could make popcorn and watch it together with Barton.

Stark's poorly hidden animosity put a definite dampener on the rest of the introduction although Sam showed a flash of interest when introduced to Banner and Dean definitely perked up when it was Natasha's turn.

With the formalities out safely of the way, Cap showed their guest into the conference room.

With a brief, "Jarvis if you would," the screen lit up with an enlarged image of Strange's living room; and although she had seen it at least a dozen times by now, the semi-circle of mystic symbols, combined with the several large brown stains on the rich Persian carpet and the outline of two gigantic wings carved in black ash into the floor still send a small chill down her spine.

"Well then, shall we get started?" Steve Rogers asked.


	7. Chapter 7 - A Few Good Men

**Warnings:** Nothing exotic, just the odd swearing here and there.

**Disclaimer: **I'm still only borrowing the characters and own nothing.

**Author's Note:** Hiya there folks. Long time no post. Again. I hope you'll find this chapter worth the wait. Enjoy!

Oh, and sorry for being a bit down on Stark. Don't worry, I am well aware he is a very complex character and he will get his due.

* * *

><p><strong>Chapter 7 - A Few Good Men<strong>

Steve Rogers suppressed the urge to rub his temple to ease the headache steadily growing behind his eyes. He also suppressed the urge to sigh.

Sometimes he really missed the bad old days of sleeping in muddy trenches, dodging artillery shells and charging uphill against fortified Nazi strongholds. At least back then, the bad guys wore red and black armbands so you knew who to shoot. Well, most of the time anyway.

The Winchesters on the other hand were doing their darned best at giving of an air of harmlessness and affability. Unfortunately it wasn't really putting a dent in the unmistakable undercurrent of danger that simmered around the two brothers. Even without the damning accusations that had come to light during the shouting match between Romanoff and Tony – and that reminded him that he and Natasha needed to have a _long_ talk about the spy slipping back into her old S.H.I.E.L.D. mindset and withholding information. Damn it! He needed to able to trust that Romanoff had his back, because these days, well, no one else seemed to – Cap would still have pegged Dean and Sam Winchester as dangerous men from the moment he first laid eyes on them.

It was in the set of their shoulders, loose and relaxed, yet at the same time ready for instant action. It was in the way they walked, each step unconsciously choreographed around their center of gravity even as they seamlessly covered each others weak spots. And it was in the way their eyes continuously roamed, analyzing and assessing potential threats and weaknesses.

The soldier in Cap easily recognized the Winchesters as experienced fighters. Killers too from the way Romanoff and Barton treated them. As for cold-blooded murderers, though...

Cap frowned. His gut told him no, and he had long since learned to listen to his instincts. Then again, he had been fooled before, he reminded himself bitterly. He would have to suspend judgment on that front until he could get a proper look at the evidence himself or until either of them gave him a reason to think otherwise. If there was one thing he had learned over the years it was that things were never black and white and until he could sort out the gray zones he'd give the Winchesters the benefit of the doubt.

Pushing away the doubts, the worry and the damnable headache he nodded at Sam Winchester to begin.

Sam took the cue and pulled out a thick file from his jacket pocket. "So, turns out this is bigger than we originally thought," he said. If he noticed the way all five Avengers suddenly tensed as his hand briefly disappeared from view he masked it well.

"This," he quickly flipped through a stack of crime scene photos and selected one with a blurry close-up of a symbol from Strange's apartment, he paused briefly and checked that he had everybody's attention, "is a proto-Enochian symbol."

The revelation was met with a slightly confused silence. Cap quickly looked around to make sure that this wasn't just yet another 21st century reference that he alone didn't get, but this time even Tony looked blank.

"That means it was written in the language of the First Word," Sam tried to clarify. Unfortunately this explanation only managed to raise a few questioning eyebrows and garner an uncomprehending shoulder shrug from Hawkeye. Sam took a deep breath, "It predates Creation itself."

"Or you know, it's really really _really _old," Dean supplied. The elder Winchester gave Barton a speculative look and then copied the archer by leaning back in his chair and plonking his feet up on the table with an insolent grin. Stark twitched slightly.

"What does that mean?" Banner asked with a frown. He reached out and picked up the photo, studying it intently for a second or two until his face turned pale – though thankfully not green – and he quickly dropped it again.

"Well for one, it's not meant for human eyes," Sam said, quickly scooping up the picture. "Its power is diluted here because this is only a copy and the medium is different, but I'm guessing none of you could stand to look directly at the symbols for any lengths of time when you first discovered them?"

Steve couldn't fully suppress the shudder that the memory of first stepping into Dr. Strange's study still evoked. He had told himself that the sense of vertigo and odd pressure had been from the grisly sight of the body lying on the floor and the thick stench of ozone, rotten eggs and the cloying tang of coppery blood that had hung in the air.

Of course he had seen and smelt much worse during the War; and now that Winchester mentioned it, he remembered the discomfort getting acutely worse when he had squatted down to inspect the strangely primal and still glistening symbols. In the end he had been forced to leave the room. Come to think of it, none of the Avengers had lingered a second longer than they needed to, even though most of them were not remotely squeamish.

They all waited as Stark attempted to magnify the symbol on the big screen only to find blurry and distorted patches of pixels that warped and fizzled the closer Jarvis zoomed in. The inventor swore and started a mumbled conversation with the A.I. to try to resolve the technical issue.

"So what do they say?" Cap gestured at the pile of pictures, ignoring Tony for the moment.

"That is what we need to figure out," Sam said. "We won't know what we're dealing with until we know what they were meant to trap."

"Or summon," Dean muttered under his breath.

"Just how the hell are we supposed to decipher them if we can't even look at them?" Barton objected. Despite his apparently relaxed pose, Cap could tell Hawkeye was anything but. Their resident sniper had been on edge for a while now and although Cap understood the reason for that only too well – Mockingbird's smiling face flashed unbidden in his mind and the ex-soldier resolutely pushed away the leaden taste of failure and acrid guilt that always flooded his mouth when he thought of the agent – eventually something had to give.

Sam shrugged. "There are ways around that. But that's not the real problem."

"Well, what is then?" Tony asked snappishly, looking up from his battle with the blurry screen. The inventor didn't bother to mask the hostility on his face.

Speaking of things which had to give, Steve felt the damn vice around his skull tighten a notch just by looking at Stark. When Steve had known Howard during the War, the man had been a reckless, egotistical, obnoxious ass prone to self-destructive behavior. He had also been brilliant, generous, fearless and a true friend. Tony, it appeared, was hellbent on one-upping his old man on every single one of those character traits; the good _and_ the bad. Only in classic Tony Stark style, the billionaire had decided to forgo self-destructive and go straight for downright suicidal if Romanoff's increasingly urgent reports were to be believed. And say would you would about the assassin, but she had yet to be wrong when it came to reading people.

"The problem is that anybody who can read the damn thing is either dead or locked in a cage," Dean said cryptically, dragging Steve out of his musings. Winchester's face grew dark. "And trust me, you do _not_ want to open that cage."

"And just exactly why should we trust anything you tell us?" Tony challenged him.

"Oh, I don't know. Maybe because if you don't, you're gonna get yourself killed." Dean responded easily, but there was an unmistakable edge to his tone. Steve realized that whatever hero worship Dean had harbored for Iron Man was very quickly wearing thin and that if Tony kept pushing him, Winchester would start to push right back.

"So how do you propose we solve this?" Steve turned to Sam, heading of the argument between Tony and Dean before it could escalate. He also made sure to give Tony a warning look. He didn't particularly enjoy pulling rank on the self proclaimed 'genius billionaire playboy philanthropist' – well less so now than in the early years – but he damn well would if he had to.

Sam cleared his throat. "Well, we have an... associate of sorts... who might be able to help. He speaks Enochian which is derived from proto-Enochian. He can't read the symbols, but he can make some educated guesses as to the basic meaning of some of them. It's not very accurate, but unless you've got a prophet stashed away somewhere it's probably our best bet at figuring this out."

"How accurate is 'not very accurate'," Natasha inquired.

"Think of it like you or me trying to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs. We might recognize that one looks like a bird, but we wouldn't know it symbolizes the god Horus."

"So not very accurate then," the Widow noted drily.

"Unfortunately no." Sam gave her an apologetic smile.

"Can this associate of yours be trusted?" Hawkeye asked with his usual bluntness.

"Cas has saved our asses more times than I can remember," Dean bristled.

"He's solid," Sam nodded.

The Widow and Hawkeye did that annoying thing where they communicated seemingly telepathically. After a second Hawkeye's mouth twisted slightly in unhappiness which apparently signaled that Romanoff had won whatever disagreement they had just had because she simply turned to back to the discussion and said, "All right."

"When can he start translating?" Cap asked, choosing once again to trust in the Widow's judgment.

"Uh lets see. In about... ten hours ago?" Dean smirked insolently.

Sam gave him a look. "Yeah, sorry. We thought it best not to wait," he apologized with a light shrug.

Stark snorted skeptically.

Steve rose from his seat. "I appreciate your initiative, but in the future I would prefer if you didn't include third parties without discussing it with us first." Cap put a bit of steel in his voice to make it clear that this wasn't really a request. The last thing they needed were more unknown players on an already cracking board.

Surprisingly, this mild reprimand seemed to have two vastly different effects on the Winchesters. Dean appeared to respond instinctual to Cap's tone of authority by straightening as much as his slouched position would allow him, almost like he was trying to stand to attention, before he caught himself and deliberately slouched down in his seat even further.

Steve remembered Tony once explaining to him that it was the 'Captain America effect'. Apparently you could always tell whether Captain America was in the room or not by how straight people's backs were. The billionaire insisted it was a conditioned knee-jerk effect from people "brainwashed by the military". He had subsequently insisted on proving this theory by testing it 'empirically' in the Helicarrier mess hall by blaring a magnified recording of Captain America yelling "ATTENTION!" at the top of his lungs. Cap had to admit that the collective reaction of the room had been impressive and yes, comical.

Unfortunately as it turned out, Fury had snuck down to enjoy a before-dinner rice pudding snack and the S.H.I.E.L.D. Director had _not_ appreciated suddenly finding himself standing to attention with a bowl of white goo adorning his trousers and shoes. There had been hell to pay and Stark had officially been banned from the Helicarrier for a month along with Hawkeye and Banner for assisting him in breaking into the speaker system. Curiously, Cap had automatically been assumed completely innocent of the whole affair even though he had knowingly supplied the recording.

In contrast to his brother, Sam Winchester's reaction to Cap's tone was mostly negative. In fact, the man froze slightly and something close to mutiny flashed across his face before it hardened into an impassive mask. Steve was thrown by his behavior since Sam had appeared the more even-keeled of the two brothers so far. If Sam Winchester had been in Steve's squad, this reaction would instantly have marked him as a troublemaker and as someone with a serious grudge against authorities.

"Fine," Sam bit out, the blandness in his tone doing little to soften the suddenly hard look in his eyes. "But the same goes for you."

The demand earned Sam one of the Widow's famous raised eyebrows, but this time Natasha chose to leave it up to Steve to decide how to respond.

"Deal," Cap acceded after a brief moment of deliberation. "We won't bring any new people on board without your knowledge." He carefully chose not to mention the large number of S.H.I.E.L.D. agents and assets who were already working the investigations.

"So, what's the plan?" Banner asked, breaking the tension.

Dean shrugged. "Now we look at the evidence."

"Evidence?" Banner asked mildly.

"Yeah you know, check out the crime scene, look at the coroner's report, figure out the time line, talk to witnesses. All that jazz."

Banner frowned. "I thought you were supposed to be experts on the occult. Not trained investigators."

"We're not. We're hunters." Sam said as if that explained everything.

"Which is what exactly," Stark butted in, curious despite himself.

The two brothers shared a brief look.

"It means that this is what we do," Sam said vaguely and waved at the plasma screen with the bloody crime scene.

"Now, do you mind showing us what you've got so far?" Dean said brusquely, cutting of the line of inquiry.

Over the next forty-five minutes Dean and Sam sifted through two large cardboard boxes of accumulated evidence and four binders of written reports and crime scene analyzes. There seemed to be very little rhyme or reason to the way they tackled the information, except for Dean's look of disgust when he flipped open one of Pym's detailed analyzes of the chemical compounds collected from the crime scene. "Here geek boy," he called out and threw the offending flop of paper to his brother. "Go to town." Sam simply huffed before he dug into the text, brow furrowing in concentration.

Ten minutes in, a bored Barton was entertaining himself with writing dirty jokes on the ceiling by throwing pencils at odd angles to make them leave the correct markings; Banner had allied himself with Sam, mumbling scientific explanations and pointing out various formulas; Stark had resigned himself to staring daggers at the two brothers and Natasha watched over the entire proceedings with sharp, cool eyes.

"Sulfur residue," Sam grunted out of nowhere. "Lots of it."

"Fan-fucking-tastic," Dean muttered back without stopping rifling through the wallet of the dead barista.

And so it went. Every few minutes, one of the Winchesters would call out some random tidbit of evidence to his brother that made absolutely no sense to anybody else in the room. Dean, who had mostly dealt with physical evidence, had also started collecting a small pile of apparently significant clues while discarding the rest of the bits and pieces back into their boxes.

It appeared for all the world, like the two brothers had completely forgotten about the presence of the Avengers except for the baleful looks Dean would periodically exchange with Iron Man.

"Huh, that's actually really interesting," Sam remarked under his breath.

"What?" Dean grumbled distractedly.

"They found trace amounts of a substance that is 17 magnitudes denser than any naturally occurring element on Earth," Sam read aloud from the report in front of him.

At Dean's annoyed and uncomprehending look, Banner's inner teacher took over, "That's about the same density as the matter of a neutron star."

"So...?"

"They found it in the ash from the burnt feathers," Sam said.

"Huh, that is weird." Dean cocked his head. "Wait are you telling me that their wings are made of _star dust_? Dude that is so cool," he paused, "... and super gay."

"Is it important?" The Widow asked pointedly.

"Nope," Dean shrugged. "Just you random weird fact of the day."

"So, do you mind telling us what we're dealing with here?" Cap asked, taking advantage of the opening to finally get some answers. He pointed to the picture of the dead body with the unmistakable outlines of two black wings branded into the floor.

The Winchesters once again communicated silently with a look, a frown and a tiny head shake.

"We prefer to have all the facts before we start speculating," Sam said smoothly. It occurred to Cap that Sam Winchester would probably have made a great lawyer.

When he saw that this answer wasn't going to be enough, Sam gave Cap an appraising look. "You've dealt with alien gods, yes? Just think of these things," he nodded at the screen, "as their close cousins... with wings."

"Are you saying they are Asgardian?" Cap asked, brow furrowed.

"We're saying that you don't really need to know what they are," Dean said. "Trust me, it's better for everybody involved if you don't. It'll only screw with your heads," he added patronizingly.

"Fuck that," Stark declared, his patience having finally snapped.

"Excuse me?"

"I said fuck that. We're not some gullible hillbillies you can scare with your bullshit. We're the goddamn Avengers. We eat terrorists and fucking alien armies for breakfast so cut the crap and tell us what we want to know."

"Or else... what?" Dean prompted, an ugly expression on his face.

"Or else, I will personally enjoy kicking your ass and locking you away for good." Stark spat.

The words hung in the air for a moment.

"Dude, what the hell is your problem?" Dean was on his feet and in Stark's face so quickly it was only because of Steve's superhuman reflexes he managed to get between the two of them.

"My problem?! My problem is that there are two psycho whack jobs in my tower," Stark had to lean around the immovable Cap to poke Dean in the chest. "And I don't really like being in the company of mass murderers."

At Stark's words, Dean had grown completely still although Steve could still see the barely contained rage simmering in his eyes.

"Mass murderers?" Dean asked blandly.

"I've seen your rap sheet, asshole."

The rage appeared to drain away from Winchester and Steve thought he saw something crumble in the man's eyes before it was deliberately replaced with a facsimile of cold indifference.

"Yeah, well. You shouldn't believe everything you read," Dean said nonchalantly. He smiled mirthlessly and turned to walk back to his seat. "We're the good guys."

"Tell that to young women you tortured and murdered in St. Louis, or to the people in the police station you blew up to cover your tracks or to the diner full of people you shot up for fun on national TV," Tony taunted. When that failed to get a rise out of either Winchester although Sam's face looked like a thundercloud he called out, "Or do you only care about the friends and family you've killed?"

Dean froze in place.

"Jessica Moore, Ellen and Jo Harvelle, Pamela Barnes, Samuel Campbell... Bobby Singer. Any of those names ringing a bell?"

The subtle tensing of Dean's shoulder was all the warning Steve had. He barely managed to catch the first aimed at Tony's face an inch before before it would have broken the billionaire's nose.

"You don't get to say their names," Dean hissed in a deadly voice. So quickly Steve was sure he must have imagined it, he saw Dean Winchester's eyes flash black with rage and he suddenly had to struggle to hold Dean's fist back. Startled by the intensity in Dean's expression, Stark took an involuntary step back.

"Dean," Sam called out in a tense voice.

Dean froze at the sound of his brother and then closed his eyes and took a deep shuddering breath. Then another. "Yeah. I'm good." He relaxed his arm although Steve still hadn't released his crushing grip on his hand and wrist.

This time it was Sam's turn to use a deadly calm voice when he addressed Steve; "You're gonna want to let my brother go now."

Cap noted for the first time just how _big_ Sam Winchester really was when the youngest Winchester rose to his full height, the threat of violence written in every line of his body. Refusing to be intimidated, Cap instead assessed the still heavily breathing Dean before nodding and carefully releasing him.

Cap also cast a quick glance over at Banner who was being watched intently by Romanoff in case he started showing signs of turning green. Cap wasn't too worried; Banner had excellent self-control these days, but as they had learned the hard way it was definitely better to be safe than sorry when it came to the Hulk and furniture. Besides experience told that the Hulk didn't take too kindly to a team member, and in particular Tony, being threatened. Even if the idiot had provoked the situation himself.

Barton on the other hand looked like he hadn't moved a muscle throughout the whole scuffle, but Steve knew he had a desert eagle aimed at the Winchesters under the table, ready to take them out in less than a heartbeat.

"All right. Everybody calm down," Cap tried to regain control. "Stark take a walk," he ordered. Tony looked furious for a moment before nodding to himself and stalking off.

Well this was going just wonderful. Steve only stopped himself from closing his eyes and groaning through sheer force of will. _Goddamnit! Man up, Rogers_, he ordered himself. _Stop feeling sorry for yourself, soldier, and do your damn job_. The fact that the voice in his head sounded an awful lot like Colonel Phillips almost made him smile.

Natasha in the meantime had sidled up to the Winchesters and started to speak rapidly in a soothing tone of voice. It took her less than a minute to get Dean to flash her a flirting smile although Sam was harder to thaw. Sometimes the Russian assassin could be downright scary.

"Anyway, where were we?" Natasha asked after everybody had calmed down and were seated again.

The atmosphere was still strained after the brief display of violence, however the Winchesters seemed remarkably unfazed. They looked at each other and Dean shrugged.

"Well," the older Winchester drawled. "Before we got... sidetracked... I was just about to say 'Bingo'." Dean reached out and held up an evidence bag with what looked like a blood-smeared matchbook.

"What is that?" Banner asked, as Sam grabbed the bag from his brother and studied its content.

Sam's brow furrowed as he tried to decipher the blocky lettering obscured by smears of dried blood. Then his brows rose in surprise.

"Is this...?" He asked his brother.

"Yup." Dean turned to the Avengers. "Ladies and Gentlemen," he proclaimed with a grin. "We're going to the Hellfire Club."

* * *

><p><strong> References:<strong> Today's casual references include: Colonel Phillips aka the surly officer in charge of the Super Soldier program played by Tommy Lee Jones in the first Captain America movie. The Supernatural references are a bit more wide-ranging; we've got the by now classic accusation of the St. Louis torture/murder from the episode Skin (S01E06), we've got the reference to the destruction of the police station (and the death of Agent Hendrickson) from Jus in Bello (S03E12) and lastly the Leviathan crime/murder spree from "Slash Fiction" (S07E06). The following should go without mention, but I'll go through them anyway: Jessica (Sam's girlfriend who died in the pilot), Ellen and Jo, the mother-daughter act from the Roadhouse, Pamela (the psychic from season 4) and Samuel Campbell aka grumpy grandad. I won't insult anybody by explaining who Bobby is...


	8. Chapter 8 - From the Frying Pan

**Warnings:** None.

**Disclaimer:** For fun only, no profit.

**Author's Note:** Well, what do you know: I'm still alive and here is chapter 8! It is a bit light on action for the simple reason that I finally decided to cut it in half too keep it from getting too clunky – the good news is that its more action-packed half (aka chapter 9) is therefore almost ready to be posted.

Since I last posted a lot of stuff have happened in the MCU. For instance, this small movie called Avengers: Age of Ultron came out as well as another tiny flick you might have heard of called Ant-Man. Unfortunately it is far too late for me to incorporate the – at times rather big – changes in canon into the narrative of this story, so I guess going forward it will technically be AU. Shucks!

Last annoying AN: Since I have now done some soul searching and come to the distressing conclusion that I'm incapable of posting at reasonable intervals (looking at you, chapter 8) I feel that I should at least offer my awesome readers - seriously, you guys are amazing! - an alternative while you wait for me to get my act together. So I would like to wholeheartedly recommend what is in my humble opinion the best Avengers fics out there and a great inspiration for my own take on at least some of the Avengers:

Oxycodone Days and Into the Fire by Naja Melanoleuca

Seriously if you haven't read them yet, they are a fantastic read.

Now, on with the show!

* * *

><p><strong>Chapter 8 – From the Frying Pan…<strong>

"Are you sure this is the right place?" Cap asked skeptically, eyeing the street with its run-down buildings, broken and boarded windows and scattered heaps of trash. A street over, a car alarm was blaring mindlessly and the faint crash of breaking crockery and voices raised in anger added their own unhappy counterpoint to the racket.

Sam Winchester briefly looked up from his task of picking the heavy padlock of a graffiti-covered roller shutter. "Don't worry. We know what we're doing."

"There." The lock surrendered a second later and Sam grabbed the bottom handles, pulling the rusty metal sheet upwards. Stuck at first, the shutter grudgingly started to move with a metallic screech that set Steve's teeth on edge. He looked over his shoulder to make sure they weren't being watched, although he doubted anybody would have given them a second look in this neighborhood even if he'd been wearing his uniform.

With a last squeak, the shutter came to a rest.

"Took you long enough," Dean commented to his brother with a smirk and a well-placed elbow as he pushed past him and disappeared into the building. Sam mumbled something unflattering under his breath but was quick to follow. Neither Winchester bothered to look back to check whether their companions were keeping up with them.

After the ugly confrontation back at the Tower, the brothers' attitude towards the Avengers had cooled considerably. Dean in particular had dialed down his kid-in-a-candy-store act, replacing it instead with studied indifference; when he wasn't downright ignoring the Avengers' existence. Sam on the other hand had remained unfailingly polite, although his smiles were fewer and far less friendly now. Steve had been slightly surprised to find that he regretted the change.

Left standing outside alone in the growing dusk, Cap and Pym shared a brief look and Ant-Man raised a sardonic brow as if to say, _this was your idea, after you_.

Sending out a short but fervent prayer that this wasn't yet another mistake, that he wouldn't later look back on this moment as a point of no return – because God knew, he couldn't afford any more of those – Steve Rogers squared his shoulders and stepped across the threshold, following the Winchesters into the darkness.

"I was expecting something... slightly more glamorous," Pym noted dryly a few moments later as he took in the shadowy interior of an abandoned garage, his voice echoing hollowly in the big empty space.

"This isn't the main entrance to the Hellfire Club," Sam explained as he carefully made his way across the uneven concrete floor with its scattered islands of leftover parts and only partly covered inspections pits. "To get in that way you need to have a personal invitation from the Black King or the White Queen."

"Which we don't have," Dean's voice ghosted back from the far corner of the building. The elder Winchester appeared to be searching for something, crouching down every few paces and scattering piles of dirt and moldy old newspapers with his boots.

"So what? We are the Avengers. I don't see how they could refuse us entrance," Pym pointed out.

"Oh, getting inside is no problem. People wander in all the time. But if you enter the Hellfire Club uninvited, the other patrons are no longer bound by the rules of neutrality," Sam told them.

"Which means you're fair game and trust me there are much less messy ways to commit suicide. Quicker too." Dean had been hunkered down near a section of the wall and now straightened. "Found it Sammy!"

Sam immediate loped over to his brother and in concert the Winchesters lifted an old oil drum, shuffling it a few feet out of the way to clear a section of the floor.

When the two Avengers reached the spot, Cap saw that the landscape of oil-stained concrete was broken by a rough square of heavy wooden planks turned black and gray with age and rot. The thick iron ring anchored to the wood near the edge marked it as a trapdoor.

"So that's why you didn't want to take a large party," Steve reasoned. "Your plan is to sneak us in?"

"Yes and no," Sam answered evasively, wiping his hand on his trousers.

Back at the Tower, Cap had secretly been relieved that the Winchesters had been adamant that no more than two Avengers accompanied them when they to investigate the Hellfire Club. While Steve had bristled at Dean's declaration that he didn't feel like, "_playing tourist guide to a bunch of first-timers_." the Winchesters' terms had also allowed him to neatly sidestep one major issue; namely that fact that he simply didn't trust the Avengers to work together as a team in the field right now. During the War, Cap had seen first-hand what happened to soldiers when infighting was allowed to get in the way of teamwork and there was no way in hell he was about to risk the safety of his team because of fraying tempers and bruised egos. So until he could a better handle on the Avengers, it was safer to stay in smaller and more manageable units.

Besides, this was only supposed to be a simple reconnaissance mission.

"Well what is it? Yes or no?" Ant-Man prompted Sam, a sharp edge to his tone.

Cap eyed Pym and once again wondered if he'd made a mistake in allowing the scientist on this mission. Originally, he had opted to bring the Wasp as his backup. Out of all of the Avengers, Janet had been the only one to vote for the Winchesters without having some sort stake in their presence, making her the least biased and therefore the obvious choice as far as Cap was concerned.

However, when Pym had finally decided to leave his lab and join the team, he had flat out refused to let his wife go, demanding rather than volunteering to take her place. To Steve's dismay, Janet had meekly agreed to this without putting up a fight. He also hadn't missed the way Natasha's eyes had narrowed in displeasure, thin lines forming around her mouth, but the Russian had decided to hold her tongue.

Steve sighed mentally. Janet van Dyne was one the fiercest and most intelligent women Cap had ever had the honor of working with and she _never_ backed down from a fight. Or rather, she hadn't before.

Just one more thing that had changed in the last three months, Steve thought bitterly.

Janet and Bobbi had immediately hit it off when Mockingbird had first joined the team and the two of them had quickly become best friends. They had even managed to get Natasha to come out of her shell every now and again. When Bobbi died, Janet had taken it hard. Even though a glimpse of the old feisty Wasp occasionally shone through, most days she walked around a shadow of her former self.

More worryingly perhaps, it appeared that the more withdrawn Janet grew, the more controlling and overprotective Hank became. Pym had always had a possessive streak, but recently his behavior had started to rub Steve the wrong way.

"We're not using the front door, but if we play our cards right we might be able to claim immunity anyway. But we're gonna have to talk _really_ fast." Dean said in answer to Pym's question. "And that is gonna be a hell of a lot easier if we're only trying to sell them on four guys and not an entire Saturday cartoon lineup. No offense, but you Avengers ain't exactly the subtle types."

"No offense taken," Cap offered with a small insincere smile. Pym huffed, but dropped the subject.

While he spoke, Dean had been using his sleeve to rub the top layer of grime from a metal insignia embedded in the wood. The metal was so tarnished that Steve hadn't even noticed it at first.

His interest caught, Pym bowed down and studied the sigil. "Is that an Aquarian Star?"

"Yeah," Sam gave the scientist a slightly impressed look. "It's also the symbol for the Men of Letters."

"Men of Letters?"

"They were an occult order whose main purpose was to chronicle the supernatural. They were very powerful before they got destroyed in the late 50's," Sam lectured distractedly.

"How does this help us?" Steve wanted to know.

"Sam a little assistance here," Dean broke in, grunting when he tried and failed to lift the trapdoor, years of ingrained grime and dirt having sealed it firmly in place.

Growing short on patience, Steve stepped in and with a single mighty yank pulled the wood free from its decaying frame before Sam had a chance to move. In fact, he tore the trapdoor completely free from its hinges and was left holding the crumbling square of wood before he tossed it aside with a satisfying thud. It might be childish, but it made him feel a little better.

Dean raised his eyebrow, caught between annoyance and admiration. "That works too, I guess," he muttered under his breath.

Dirt and wood splinters rained down into the yawning darkness, bouncing off the narrow shaft before finally hitting the bottom with faint rustle.

Sam turned to Cap. "It helps us because the Men of Letters had their own special backdoor into the Hellfire Club as well as an agreement of immunity, sort of like an ambassadorial pass." He peered into the hole and looked questioningly at his brother, "Think we're gonna need rope?"

"So the plan is that we're going to pretend to be these Men of Letters?" Pym asked. "But you just told us that the order was destroyed years ago."

"It was," Dean said shortly. "Wait, I think I can see some sort of ladder," he pointed to something that might have been a metal rung sticking out the shaft wall.

Dean started to move towards the hole. "I'll climb down first to –"

Before he could take another step, Dean was halted by Cap's strong grip on his arm.

"I'm going to need to know exactly what the plan is here," Cap demanded. He'd had his fill of the Winchesters' evasive half-answers and glibness. Enough was enough.

Dean slowly straightened and then deliberately shook Captain America's hand off, his eyes glittering dangerously. Cap was reminded again of the way Winchester's eyes had suddenly changed color back at the Tower.

"The plan is, we go in, you let us do _all_ the talking and hopefully we don't all die today," Dean growled through clenched teeth.

"Look, you just need to trust us," Sam appealed, once again playing peacemaker. Despite his earnest expression, Cap also caught a hint of something hard and implacable in the younger Winchester's eyes. Sam wasn't really giving him a choice, Cap knew, he was just being more polite about it than his brother. "Like I said, we know what we're doing," Sam added quietly.

Steve felt like cursing. God, he hated feeling this dependent and passive. He understood _why_ the Winchesters were keeping it on a need to know only basis – for men like Dean and Sam Winchester trust did not come easy, if at all – and if even a fraction of Tony's accusations were true, the two brothers were right to be cautious in their dealings with the Avengers. But right now, they were all Cap had and damn it if this Hellfire Club wasn't the first half-decent lead they'd dug up in days. It might very well be their last shot at finding Doctor Strange.

Even though it galled him, he reluctantly took a step back.

"I am willing to follow your lead for now." Catching the brothers' eyes in turn, Cap made sure they got his message loud and clear. "But that does _not_ mean I trust you."

"Fair enough," Sam nodded after a moment, a flicker of respect running across his face.

Dean shrugged dismissively, "Fine by me."

Pym had stayed in the background throughout the exchange. Cap couldn't tell what the scientist was thinking, but he wasn't happy with the situation. _Welcome to the club_, Steve thought tiredly.

"Now, if you'll excuse me," Dean said sarcastically and brushed past Steve. His path now unobstructed, he quickly scrambled down the shaft with a few grunts and a muffled curse. A moment later the orange glow of a lighter flicked to life, illuminating the bottom of the tunnel and creating an impression of hungry shadows and leaping flames dancing on the walls of the narrow shaft.

Watching as first Sam and then Pym descended into the illusion of a fiery pit, Steve couldn't help but appreciate how oddly fittingly the entrance to the Hellfire Club lived up to its name – even if it was just the backdoor. When it was his turn, Cap didn't bother using the rungs embedded in wall and instead dropped the 40 feet down and landed in an athletic crouch.

"Dude, you have _got_ to teach me that move." Dean gave him a wide grin before he remembered himself and quickly smothered the smile. Once again Cap felt a small pang.

"Let's go," Sam said quietly.

Dean naturally took the lead as they walked through the narrow tunnel. There was no chatter as they moved and Cap had the opportunity to observe the two Winchesters without distractions. They seemed more at ease here in this shadowy underground world than they had above ground, almost as if this was their true element. Steve briefly wondered what kind of soldiers were used to fighting their battles in dark tunnels. And the more time he spent with them, the more certain he became that Dean and Sam Winchester were soldiers. He didn't know in which war or on whose side they had fought, but they were not just mercenaries or common criminals. They had a cause.

Cap had served for years with men and women who had fought and died for a higher purpose and he recognized the same implacable zeal in the brothers. Hidden beneath the surface perhaps, but there nonetheless. These men would not kill indiscriminately or for their own gratification; they followed a code.

But then again, so did agents of Hydra.

They walked for what felt like a small eternity but what was in reality closer to ten minutes before the tunnel abruptly ended in a thick wooden door. Like the trapdoor before it, the wood was dark and brittle and the same six-pointed symbol shone dully from its center.

"Ready?" Dean asked, looking back at them.

"Remember, don't make eye contact. Don't engage with anyone. Don't accept offers of drinks or food. And whatever you do, _do not_ make any deals," Sam impressed on them.

"Also, don't show fear," Dean added, drawing a serrated hunting knife from his waistband and checking the edge with his thumb. "Some of the things in there can smell it."

To Cap's dismay, he couldn't tell whether the Winchesters were joking or not. Next to him, he could feel Pym shifting.

"On three," Sam said quietly and positioned himself. As the younger Winchester wrestled the door open, they could hear the sound of cracking plaster and flecks of paint raining down from the other side. Steve steeled himself, noting out of the corner of his eye how Dean was grabbing his knife tightly, ready to spring into action.

There was a moment of breathless anticipation.

Then door suddenly gave way and swung open…

… to reveal a nondescript storage room completely devoid of life. Carton boxes and multicolored bottles lined the row of shelves that ran up and down the length of the room.

Dean grimaced, looking about as sheepish as Cap felt, and Sam cleared his throat. "Um, okay so that was kinda anticlimactic."

Pym snorted his agreement and Steve even cracked half a smile as Dean clambered over the small wall of wooden crates that had been stacked against the section of wall that had doubled as the hidden door.

Spotting the modern industrial grade door at the other end of the room, Sam smiled wolfishly. "All right. Let's try this again."

This time the view that met them on the other side of the door was very different.

* * *

><p><strong>References:<strong> On the Supernatural side of things, we have the Men of Letters. If you aren't quite caught up with SP in this regard, I recommend a quick wiki search as I will continue to allude to the order. As for the Avengers, I intend to make the Hellfire Club my own but with a few nods to the original X-Men version. As such, the Black King and White Queen reference shouldn't be taken too serious. Suffice it to say that they were at times the alias of Sebastian Shaw and Emma Frost respectively and if you don't know who they are, it doesn't really matter.


End file.
